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A JOURNEY DUE NORTH, 

IN THE SUMIMER OF 1856. 



JOURNEY DUE NORTH; 



BEING 



NOTES OF A RESIDENCE IN RUSSIA. 



BT 



GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. 




BOSTON: 
TIOKNOR AND FIELDS-.- 

M DCCC LVIII. 




KIVEKSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



!/- 



b 






" Forasmuch as it is necessarie for alle those who minde to take in hande 
the travelle into farre and strange countreyes to endeavoure themselves, 
not only to understaunde the orders, commodities, and fruitfuUnesse there- 
of, but also to apply them to the settynge forth of ye same, wherebye it 
may encourage others to ye like travaile ; therefore have I thoughte goode 
to make a briefe rehearsalle of the order of this my travaile in Russia 
and Muscovia ; because it was my chaunce to fall in with the northe-easte 
parts of Europe before I came to Muscovia, I will faithfullye exercise my 
knowledge therein." 

" The Book of the great and mighty Emperor of Russia, and 
Duke of Muscovia, and of the dominions, orders, and com- 
modities thereunto belonging : drawen by Richard Chancel- 
lour : A.D. 1599." 



" And whereas (he saith) I have before made mention how Muscovia 
was in our time discovered by Eichard Chancellour, in his voyage toward 
Cathay, by the direction and information of M. Sebastian Cabota, who 
long before this had this secret in his minde, it is meete to telle that the 
same is largely and faithfully written in ye Latin tongue by that learned 
yong manne Clement Adams scolemaster to the Queen's henshman, as he 
received it at the mouth of the said Richard Chancellour." 

" The New Navigation and Discoverie of the Kingdom of Mus- 
covia by the Northe-Easte, in the year 1553 ; Enterprised by 
Sir Hugh Willoughbie, Knyghte, and perfoi^med by Richard 
Chancellour, Pilot-maior of the voyage : A.D. 1559." 



X 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

PAOB 

I BEGIN MY JOURNEY 1 

n. 

I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE - 41 

ni. 

I LAND AT CRONSTADT 67 

IV. 
I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, AND TAKE MY FIRST RUS- 
SIAN WALK 95 

• V. 

ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER • 120 

VI. 
THE DROSCHKY 134 

vn. 

THE czar's highway 153 

Tin. 

GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR 172 

IX. 
MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGERS 200 

X. 
THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE . 214 



Vm CONTENTS. 

XI. 

PAGE 

A COUNTRY HOUSE ' 233 

xn. 

RUSSIANS AT HOME 263 

xin. 
heyde's 298 

XIV. 
MY BED AND BOARD 317 

XV. 
I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE 330 

XVI. 
HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY *• 345 

xvn. 

THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE) 359 

XVIII. 
MUSIC AND THE DRAMA 399 

XIX. 
TCHORNI-NAROD : (tHE BLACK PEOPLE) 417 

XX. 
THE IKS 438 

l'envOI 456 



A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 



I. 

I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 

" I THANK Heaven," I said, when I came to Erquel- 
lines, on the Belgian frontier, " that I have done, for 
some time at least, with the deplorable everyday- 
humdrum state of civilization in which I have been 
vegetating so long, and growing so rankly weedy. 
Not that I am about to forswear shaving, renounce 
pantaloons, or relinquish the use of a knife and fork 
at meal-times. I hope to wear clean linen for many 
successive days to come, and to keep myself au 
courant with the doings of London through the 
media of Galignani's Messenger and the Illustrated 
News, (thrice blessed be both those travellers' joys !) 
Nay, railways shall penetrate whither I am going, 
mixed pickles be sold wholesale and retail, and pale 
ale be attainable at a more or less exorbitant price. 
I am not bound for the Ethiopio- Christian empire of 
Prester John ; I am not bound to sail for the island 
of Barataria ; my passport is not made out for the 
1 



2 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

kingdom of Utopia (would that it were) ; I cannot 
hope, in my journeyings, to see either the Yang-tse- 
Kiang, or the sources of the Nile, or the Mountains 
of the Moon. I am going, it is true, to t'other side 
of Jordan, which somewhat vague (and American) 
geographical definition may mean the other side of 
the Straits of Dover, or the Grecian Archipelago, or 
the Great Belt, or the Pacific Ocean. But, wherever 
I go, civilization will follow me. For I am of the 
streets, and streety — eis tenpolin is my haven. Like 
the starling, I can't get out of cities ; and now, that 
I have come sixteen hundred miles> it is but to 
another city — another tumour of streets and houses 
and jostling crowds ; and from my windows I can 
see a post, and wires stretching from it, the extreme 
end of which I know to be in Lothbury, London. 

I am not so wisely foolish to imagine or to de- 
clare that there is nothing new under the sun ; only 
the particular ray of sunlight that illumines me in 
my state of life has fallen upon me so long, and 
dwells on me with such a persistent sameness, bright 
as it is, that I am dazed, and sun-sick ; and, when I 
shut my eyes, have but one green star before me, 
which obstinately refuses to assume the kaleido- 
scopic changes I delight in. I must go away, I said. 
I must rub this rust of soul and body off. I must 
have a change of grass. I want strange dishes to 
disagree with me. I want to be scorched or frozen 
in another latitude. I want to learn another alpha- 
bet; to conjugate verbs in another fashion; to be 
happy or miserable from other circumstances than 
those that gladden or sorrow me now. If I could 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 3 

be hard up,^for instance, on the Bridge of Sighs, or 
wistfully eyeing my last real at the Puerta del Sol ; 
if I could be sued on a bill drawn in the Sanskrit 
character, or be threatened with arrest by a Mahom- 
etan hatti-sheriff's-officer ; if I could incur perdition 
through not believing in the seven incarnations of 
Vishnu, instead of the thirty-nine Articles ; if I could 
be importuned for copy by the editor of the Mofus- 
silite, and not the Morning Meteor ; if I could have 
the plague, or the vomito nero, or the plica polonica, 
instead of the English headache and blues, the 
change would be advantageous — salutary, I think. 
I am sure I should be much better off if I could 
change my own name, and forget my ownself for a 
time. But oh ! civilization and Foreign Office pass- 
port system — George William Frederick Earl of 
Clarendon, Baron Hyde of Hindon, won't hear of 
that. I have made up my mind to change ; I am 
determined, I said, to depart out of this kingdom ; 
but the Earl and Baron insists on stamping, and 
numbering, and registering me (all for the small sum 
of seven and sixpence) before I go. George William 
Frederick pounces upon me as a British subject 
travelling abroad ; asserts himself, his stars and gar- 
ters, at great length, all over a sheet of blue foolscap 
paper, affectionately entreats all authorities, civil and 
military, to render me aid and assistance whenever 
I stand in need of them, (I should like to catch them 
doing any thing of the sort!) and sends me abroad 
with the royal arms, his own, and a five-shilling re- 
ceipt stamp tacked to me, like a bird with a string 
tied to his leg. 



4 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

I am bound on a stern, long, cruel, rigid journey, 
far, far away, to the extreme right-hand top corner 
of the map of Europe — ^but first Due North. And 
here I am at Erquellines on the frontier of the king- 
dom of Belgium ; and this is why I thanked Heaven 
I was here. Not very far northward is Erquellines ; 
and yet I felt as if I had passed the Rubicon, when 
a parti-coloured sentry-box, the counterfeit present- 
ment of the peculiarly sheepish-looking Belgian lion 
sitting on his hind-legs, with the legend " Union is 
strength," (and, indeed, I think it would take a good 
many of these lions to make a strong one,) and a 
posse of custom-house officers — kindly, but pud- 
ding headed in appearance — told me that I was in 
the E-oyaume de Belgique. 

I am, under ordinary travelling circumstances, 
exceedingly fond of the compact little kingdom of 
King Leopold. I look at it as a fat, sensible, easy- 
going, respectable, happy-go-lucky sort of country. 
Very many pleasant days and hours have its quaint, 
quiet cities, its roomy farm-houses, its picture gal- 
leries, and sleepy canal boats, its beer, and tobacco 
aiforded me. I cannot join in the patriotic enthu- 
siasm about ' les braves Beiges,'' because I consider 
the Belgians — ^being a sensible people — to be the 
very reverse of valiant ; neither can I sympathize 
much with the archsBological public-spiritedness of 
those Belgian servants who are anxious to restore 
the Flemish language to its primeval richness and 
purity, and have published the romance of Reynard 
the Fox in the original Low Dutch. As I think it 
to be the most hideous dialect in Europe, I would 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 6 

rather they had let it be. And to say the truth, I 
am rather tired of hearing about the Duke of Alva, 
and of the Count of Egmont and Horn — though 
both worthy men in their way, doubtless — whose de- 
collation and behaviour prior to and following that 
ceremony the Belgian painters have a mania for 
representing only second to our abhorred Finding- 
of-the-Body-of-Haroldophobia. And specially do I 
object to, and protest against, in Belgium, the Field 
of Waterloo and all appertaining thereto ; the knav- 
ish livery-stable keepers in Brussels, who swindle 
you if you take a conveyance to the field ; the beg- 
gars on the road ; the magnified dustheap with the 
abashed poodle fumbling with a ball of worsted on 
the summit, and called the Mountain of the Lion ; 
the disforested forest of Soignes ; the indifferent 
outhouse called the farm of Hougomont, and the 
Voice from Waterloo, by the deceased Sergeant- 
Major Cotton. But I love Belgium, nevertheless — 
so did Julius Caesar. Antwerp — though the multi- 
plicity of Rube uses give me almost as much of a 
surfeit as a month's apprenticeship in a pastrycook's 
shop would do — Antwerp is my delight: I can 
wander for hours in that marvellous amalgam of the 
Alhambra, the Crystal Palace, and a Flemish man- 
sion, the Exchange, and on the port I fancy myself 
in Cadiz, now in Venice, now in some old English 
seaport of the middle ages. Of Brussels it behoves 
me to speak briefly, and with reticence, for that 
charming, sparkling, lively, genial, warm-hearted 
little capital holds the very next place in my affec- 
tions to Paris the beloved. Yet I stay only as many 



6 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

hours in Brussels, as, were I on another errand, I 
should stay days. Due North is my destination, so 
I go to Liege. I can't help gazing till I am satiated 
at the wondrous panorama that stretches out before 
me as we descend the four or five hundred feet gra- 
dient of descent that leads into the valley of the 
Meuse, and as the train slides down the precipitous 
almost fearful inclined plane I drink in all the mar- 
vels of the scene, enhanced as they are by the 
golden evening sunlight. I watch the domes and 
cupolas and quaint church spires, and even the fac- 
tory chimneys, glorified into Oriental minarets bj 
the delusive rays of the setting sun. Much should 
I like to alight at Liege, and seeking my inn take 
my rest there ; but an inward voice tells me that I 
have no business in Liege, that still Due North is 
my irrevocable route, and so I let the train go on its 
rattling roaring route, and compose myself to sleep 
till it shall carry me at its gruff will and pleasure 
over the frontier of Prussia. 

So ; at last at Herbesthal, and beneath the sway 
of the Belgian lion's harmless tail no longer. I am 
testy and drowsy, and feel half inclined to resent, 
as a personal affront, the proceedings of a tall indi- 
vidual, cloaked, moustachioed, and helmeted, who 
appears Banshee-like at the carriage, pokes a lantern 
in my face, and, in the Teutonic tongue, demands 
my passport. I remember, however, with timely 
resignation, that I am going Due North, to the do- 
minions of Ursa Major, the great Panjandrum of 
passports, and that I am as yet but a very young 
bear, indeed, with all my passport-troubles to come ; 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 7 

SO I give the Baron Hyde of Hindon's letter of rec- 
ommendation to the man in the helmet, and fall 
into an uneasy sleep again. I hope it may do 
him good! 

Was it at Liege or Pepinstern on the Spa Eoad 
(how different from that other Spa-Road Station, I 
know, on the Greenwich Railway, where attic-win- 
dows blink at the locomotive as it rushes by, and 
endless perspectives of the ventilated brick lanes 
and fluttering clothes-lines tell of the ugly neigh- 
bourhood where outlying tanners dwell, and rail- 
way stokers live when they are at home ; whereas 
this Spa Road is a delicious little gorge between 
purple underwooded hills, with gayly-painted cot- 
tages, and peasant-women in red petticoats, and 
little saints in sentry-boxes by the wayside, and 
along which I see ladies on horseback, and mous- 
tachioed cavaliers careering towards Spa, one of 
the most charming little watering-places in Europe) ; 
at which station was it, I wonder, that we changed 
the lumbering, roomy, drablined first-class carriages 
of the Nord, with their sheepskin rugs, and zinc 
hot-water boxes, for these spruce, glistening, coquet- 
tish carriages, so daintily furbished out with mo- 
rocco leather, and plate-glass, and varnished mahog- 
any — (when will English railway-travellers be eman- 
cipated from the villanous, flea-bitten pig-boxes, 
first, second, and third class, into which, after paying 
exorbitant fares they are thrust) — when was it that 
an imperceptible fluffiness, and albine tendency of 
hat, a shinyness of cap-peaks, an eccentricity of boot- 
tips, a braidiness of coats, a prevalence of embroid- 



8 



A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 



ered travelling-pouches, a greenness of veils, a 
twinkling of spectacles, a blondness of beards, a 
gaudiness of umbrellas, and a gutturalness of accent, 
together with the bold and sudden repudiation of 
the doctrine that tobacco-smoking on railways is 
prohibited, and must only be furtively indulged in 
(the major part of the smoke finding its way up the 
coat-sleeve) with the reluctantly extorted consent of 
the young ladies who have nerves, and the pettish 
old gentlemen, and, above all, a wavering, mysteri- 
ous, but potent smell, a drowsy compound of the 
odours of pomatum, sauerkraut, gas-meters, and 
stale tobacco-smoke, told me that I had crossed 
another frontier, and that I was in Germany ? 

The train being once more in motion in its way 
(south this time) towards Cologne, I perused my 
passport by the light of the carriage lamp, and saw 
where its virgin blueness had been sullied by the 
first patch of printing ink, scrawled writing and 
sand forming a visa. The Black Eagle of Prussia 
had been good enough to flap his wings for the first 
time on George William Frederick's talisman. He 
was good for a flight to Koln or Cologne ; but he 
was dated from Aachen, which Aachen I have just 
left, and which, — bless me ! where were my eyes 
and memory? — must have been Aix-la-Chapelle. 

I consider it to have been an exceedingly lucky 
circumstance for the reader of this paper that I, the 
Digressor, did not arrive at the City of Cologne on 
the Rhine till half-past eleven o'clock at night ; that 
it was pitch dark, and raining heavily ; that entering 
a cab I caused myself to be driven " right away " 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 9 

over the bridge of boats to the Hotel Doopeepel, in 
the suburbs of Deutz ; that, being dog-tired, I went 
immediately to bed, and that I left Cologne for 
Berlin by the first train at six a. m. the next morn- 
ing. I consider this lucky for the reader, because if 
I had had any time to wander about the streets 
of Cologne, I should infallibly have launched into 
dissertations on the cathedral, the market-women, 
the aforesaid bridge of boats, the horrifying smells, 
the quaint houses, Jean Marie Farina, and — who 
knows ! — the three kings and the eleven thousand 
virgins. 

Under existing circumstances, all I at present 
have to say of the place is, that the landlord of the 
Grand Hotel Doopeepel, at Deutz, deserves a civic 
crown, or a large gold medal, or a sword of honour — 
at all events he ought to have his deserts ; and I 
should like to have the task of giving him what he 
deserves, for the skill and ingenuity displayed in 
making my bill for a night's lodging, and some 
trifling refreshment, amount to five Prussian dollars, 
or fifteen shillings sterling. The best or the worst 
of it was, that I could not dispute any of the items. 
I had certainly had them all. Bed, wax lights, 
attendance, coffee, thimbleful of brandy, cigar, loaf 
of bread like a hardened muffin, couple of boiled 
eggs ; but oh, in such infinitesimal quantities ! As 
for the eggs, they might have been laid by a hum- 
ming-bird. The demand of the bill was prodigious, 
the supply marvellously small, but I paid it admir- 
ingly, as one would pay to see a child with two 
heads, or a bearded lady. 
1* 



IQ A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

There is a difference of opinion among travelling 
sages, as to whether a man onght under any circum- 
stances to travel first-class by rail in Germany. The 
first-class carriages are luxurious — nay, even splen- 
did vehicles, softly padded, lined with crimson vel- 
vet, and extensively decorated with silken fringes 
and curtains. On the other hand, the second-class 
carriages are also lined and padded, and are at least 
seventy-five per cent, more comfortable than our 
best English first-class carriages. Moreover, in the 
second-class, there are but two compartments to a 
seat for four persons, so that, if the carriage be not 
full, you may recline at full length on the cushions, 
which, in night-travelling, is very comfortable, and 
rejoices you much ; but then the reverse to that 
medal is, that German second-class carriages are 
nearly invariably full to the window-sill. The Ger- 
mans themselves repudiate the first-class stoutly, 
and it has passed into a Viator's proverb, that none 
but " princes. Englishmen, and fools, travel by the 
first-class." I have no particular affection for Eng- 
lishmen abroad, but I like the company of princes, 
and you may often have worse travelling compan- 
ions than fools ; so I travel, when I can afford it, 
first class. There are other temptations thereto. 
The carriage is seldom more than half-full, if 
that, and you may change your place when you 
list, which, in a dragging journey of three hundred 
and fifty miles or so, is a privilege of no small mo- 
ment ; and you have plenty of side-room for your 
rugs, and your books, and your carpet-bags. Then, 
again, there are but six passengers to a carriage 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 11 

instead of eight; and again, besides the possible 
proximity of his effulgency the reigning Grand 
Duke of Gumpetpelskirchen-Herrenbonen, the Eng- 
glishman and the fool, you may have as a travelling 
companion a lady, young, pretty, tastefully dressed 
and adorably affable, as the triumphant majority of 
German ladies (bless them !) are ; and this lady will 
smile at your mistakes in German, but without 
wounding your amour propre, and will teach you 
more of that hard-mouthed language — vivd voce — 
in ten minutes than you would learn in a month 
from a grammar and vocabulary, or from university- 
professor Doctor Schinkelstrumpf 's two-dollar les- 
sons. And this lady (whom you long immediately 
to call " du," and fall on your knees in the carriage 
before) will ask you questions about the barbarous 
country you inhabit, and explain to you the use and 
meaning of common things, such as windmills, 
milestones, electric-telegraph posts, brick kilns, and 
the like, with a naivete and simple-mindedness, de- 
liriously delightful to contemplate ; she will give 
you little meat-pies and sweet cakes to eat from her 
own amply-stored bags ; she will even — if you are 
very agreeable and well-behaved — allow you to 
comfort yourself outwardly with a dash of eau-de- 
Cologne from a silver-mounted phial, and inwardly 
with a sip from a wicker-covered flask containing a 
liquid whose nature it is no business of yours to 
inquire ; she will sing you little German leider in a 
silvery voice, and cut the leaves of your book with 
an imitation poniard ; — and all this she will do with 
such an unaffected kindness and simple dignity that 



12 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the traveller who would presume upon them, or be 
rude to her, must be a doubly-distilled brute and 
Pig, and only fit to travel in the last truck of an 
Eastern Counties fish-train, or to take care of the 
blind monkeys in the Zoological Gardens. 

And all good spirits bless and multiply the fair 
ladies of Germany! They never object to smok- 
ing. There are certain carriages — ''''fur Damen " — 
into which the men creatures are not allowed to 
penetrate, and from which tobacco smoke is, as a 
rule, excluded, though it is difficult enough to banish 
the exhalations from the neighbouring carriages ; 
but the ladies seldom (the nice ones never) patron- 
ize the carriages especially affected to their use. 
They just take railway pot-luck with the ruder 
sex; and as for smoking — cigar-smoking be it al- 
ways understood — they like it ; they delight in it ; 
elles en raffolenU They know, sagacious creatures, 
that a traveller with a cigar in his mouth is twice 
a Man; that the fumes of the fragrant Havana 
loosen the tongue, and open the heart, and dispel 
awkwardness and diffidence ; that he who wants to 
smoke, and is prevented from smoking, always feels 
aggrieved and oppressed, and is correspondingly 
sulky, disobliging, and morose. The only drawback 
to the society of the German lady in the railway 
carriage is this : that when she alights at a station, 
and in her handbell-toned voice bids you adieu and 
hon voyage — sometimes pronounced '•^ pon foyache " 
— there are always waiting on the platform for her 
other ladies young and pretty as herself, or else 
moustachioed relations (I hope they are relations), 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 13 

who fall to kissing her, and pressing both her hands, 
till you fall into despair, and howl with rage in your 
crimson velvet prisoners' van. Then the train rolls 
away, and you feel that there is a nature-abhorred 
vacuum in the left-hand corner of your waistcoat, 
and that Fraulein von Name Unknown has taken 
your heart away with her, and is now, probably, 
hanging it over her chimney-piece as a trophy, as an 
Indian chief suspends the scalps of his enemies to 
the poles of his hunting-lodge. 

On this present due-northern journey I must con- 
fess I did not lose my heart, for we were ladyless all 
the way ; but the average first-class travelling com- 
panions I had. There was a Prince — so at least I 
conjectured the asthmatic old gentleman who left us 
at Diisseldorf to be ; for who but a Prince could 
have possessed such a multiplicity of parti-coloured 
ribbons belonging to as many orders (a little soap 
and water Would have done them a world of good) 
pinned on the breast of his brown surtout, so much 
fragrant snuff on his embroidered jahot^ and such 
an impenetrably wise and aristocratic face ? Yes, 
he must have been a Prince, with seventy-five quar- 
terings at least on his 'scutcheon. Then there was 
an Englishman (besides your humble servant) and 
there was a Fool. Such a fool ! Insipiens serenissi- 
mus. He was a Frenchman, fat, fair, self-compla- 
cent, and smiling, with some worsted-work embroid- 
ery on his head for a couvrechet like a kettle-holder 
pinned into a circular form. There were mediaeval 
letters worked on it, and I tried hard to read " Polly 
put the kettle on," but could not. He was going to 



14 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

Dresden, where he was to stay a week, and exhibited 
to us every ten minutes or so a letter of credit on a 
banker there, and asked us if we thought four thou- 
sand florins would be enough to last him during his 
sojourn. He was as profoundly, carelessly, gayly, 
contentedly ignorant of things which the merest 
travelling tyro is usually conversant with as a 
Frenchman could well be ; but he knew all about 
the Boulevard des Italiens, and that was quite 
enough for him. He laughed and talked inces- 
santly, but, like the jolly young waterman, it was 
about nothing at all. He could not smoke : it gave 
him a pain in his limbs, he said ; but he liked much 
to witness the operation. Like most fools, he had 
a Fixed Idea ; and this fixed idea happened to be a 
most excellent one — being no other than this, that 
the German beer was very good, (so it is, compara- 
tively, after the Strasbourg and Biere de Mars 
abominations,) and that it was desirgible to drink 
as much of it as could possibly be obtained. He 
alighted at every station, to drink a draught of 
creaming though mawkish beverage, and seemed 
deeply mortified when the train did not stop long 
enough for him to make a journey to the buffet, and 
half inclined to quarrel with me when I persuaded 
him to take a petit verre of cognac at Minden, as a 
corrective to the malt. But he was an hospitable 
and liberal simpleton, and when we declined our- 
selves to alight, he would come with a beaming 
countenance and a Tom-fool's joke to the carriage 
window, holding a great foaming glass tankard, 
with a pewter cover, of Bock Bier, or else a bottle 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 16 

of it to last to the next station. I am not ashamed 
to say that I drank his health several times between 
Diisseldorf and Hanover, and, what is more, wished 
him good health with all my heart. 

The German railway buffets are capital places of 
" restoration ; " true oases in the great desert of cut- 
tings and embankments. The fare is plentiful, 
varied, and cheap — cheap, at least, if you received 
any thing like Christian money in change for the 
napoleons or five-frank pieces your money-changer 
gave for that blessed bank note signed " J. Fereaby," 
in the Palais Royal at Paris ; but what intensity of 
disgustful reprobation can be sufficient to character- 
ize the vile dross that is forced upon you, the de- 
based fiddlers' money, that you are ashamed to put 
in your purse, and half inclined to fling out of the 
window ; the poverty-stricken, clipped, measly, 
pockmarked, greasy, slimy silhergroschen^ neuegroS' 
chen^ grosgroschen, and gudegroschen, (the eulogistic 
adjectives silver, new, big, good, to these leprous 
testoons all breathe the bitterest satire.) A German 
refreshment room is a receptacle for all the lame, 
halt, and blind coins of the ZoUverein, the monetary 
refuse of Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Austria, Hano- 
ver, Mecklenburg, and the infinite variety of smaller 
tinpot states ; nay, you are very lucky if the waiters 
do not contrive to give you a sprinkling of Hamburg 
and Lubeck money, with a few Copenhagen sckill- 
ings, and Schleswig-Holstein marks. The rogues 
know that you have no time to question or dispute ; 
they take care not to give you your change till the 
starting-bell rings ; and by th^ time you have 



16 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

counted the abominable heap of marine-store money 
and have got over your first outbursts of passion, 
you are half-a-dozen miles away. As a climax oi 
villany, the change they give you at one station is 
not current, or is said not to be so, at the next. 
Say, waiter at Bienenbuttel, is not this the case? 
And didst thou not contumeliously refuse my Prus- 
sian piece of ten groschen? 

Why should it be that in England, the great mar- 
ket of the world, amply provisioned as it is, and 
with its unrivalled facilities of communication, re- 
freshment rooms, not only on railways, but in thea- 
tres, gardens, and other places of amusement, should 
be so scantily and poorly furnished, and at such ex- 
tortionate prices ? Why should our hunger be 
mocked by those dried-up Dead Sea fruits, those 
cheesecakes that seem to contain nothing but saw- 
dust, those sandwiches resembling thin planks of 
wood with a strata of dried glue between them, 
those three-weeks-old pork and veal pies, all over 
bumps full of delusive promise, but containing noth- 
ing but little cubes of tough gristle and antediluvian 
fat ; those byegone buns with the hard, cracked 
varnish-like veneering; that hopeless cherry-brandy, 
with the one attenuated little cherry bobbing about 
in the vase like a shrivelled black buoy ; that flatu- 
lent lemonade tasting of the cork and the wire, and 
of the carbonic acid gas, but of the lemon never ; 
that bottled brown stout like so much bottled soap- 
suds ; that scalding infusion of birch-broom mis- 
called tea ; and that unsavoury compound of warm 
plate-washings facetiously christened soup ? Why 



r BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 17 

should English railway travellers be starved as well 
as smashed ? Sir Frances Head tells us that they 
keep pigs at Wolverton, who, in course of time, are 
promoted into pork pies ; but the promotion must 
surely go by seniority. Look, for comparison, at the 
French buffets, with the savoury soup always ready ; 
the sparkling little carafons of wine, the convenient 
cotelette, the tempting slices of pate'de-foie gras, the 
crisp fresh loaves of bread, and all at really moder- 
ate prices. Look again at the German refreshment- 
rooms. That practical people (though they do in- 
dulge in smoking and metaphysics to such an extent) 
have a system of refreshment called " thumb restau- 
ration." This consists of the famous butterbrod, or 
compact little crust of bread and butter on which is 
laid ham, cold meat, poultry, game, dried salmon, or 
caviare ! The first sight of that glistening black 
condiment startled me, and made me feel Due North 
more than ever. 

Minden, Hanover, Brunswick, have been passed. 
The armorial white horse made his appearance at 
the second of these places on the coinage of the 
poor blind king, and on a flaring escutcheon in front 
of the railway terminus. At Brunswick tKere was 
Q.fete in honour of the twenty somethingeth of the 
anniversary of the accession of the reigning duke, 
which I suppose must be a source of great annual 
satisfaction to the sovereign in question, as well as 
to that other duke who doesn't reign but lives in 
Paris, paints his xiheeks, wears the big diamonds, has 
an arsenal round his bedstead, and a mint of money 
underneath it, and is such a particular friend of the 



18 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

heaven-sent emperor Napoleon the Third. The ter- 
minus was plentifully decorated with evergreens and 
banners ; there was a great deal of dust and music 
and beer-drinking going on, (the chief ingredients, 
with smoking, of a German fete,) and the platform 
was crowded with Brunswickers in holiday attire : 
beaux and belles in Teutonic-Parisian trim, and 
ruddy, straw-haired and straw-hatted country folk 
in resplendent gala-dresses. To give you a notion 
of the appearance of the more youthful female 
Brunswickers, I must recall to your remembrance 
the probable appearance of the little old woman, 
who, going to market, inadvertently fell asleep by 
the king's highway, and with whose garments such 
unwarrantable liberties were taken by a wretch by 
the name of Stout, a tinker by profession. The 
peasant girls of Brunswick look as the little old 
woman must have looked when she awoke from her 
nap ; so brief are their skirts, and so apparently un- 
recognized among them is the use of the supfusk 
garments christened by our prudish female cousins 
on the other side of the Atlantic " pantalettes ; " but 
they wear variegated hose with embroidered clocks, 
and their mothers have bidden them, as the song 
says, " bind their hair with bands of rosy hue, and 
tie up their sleeves with ribbons rare, and lace their 
boddice blue," and Lubin, happily, is not far away, 
but close at hand, and very pretty couples they make 
with their yellow hair tied in two ribboned tails be- 
hind. Mingling with the throng too, I see some 
soldiers I have been anxious, for many a long year, 
to be on visual terms with, — soldiers clad all in 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 19 

sable, with nodding black plumes, bugle ornaments 
to their uniforms, and death's-heads and cross-bones 
on their shakoes. These are the renowned Black 
Brunswickers ; and I am strangely reminded, look- 
ing at them, of him that sate in the windowed niche 
of the high hall, alone, cheerless, brooding, thinking 
only of the bloody bier of his father, and of revenge : 
— of that valiant chieftain of the Black Brunswick- 
ers who left the Duchess of Richmond's ball to die 
at Quatre Bras. 

I wish the Germans wouldn't call Brunswick 
Braunschweig ; it destroys the illusion. I can't 
think of the illustrious house that has given a dy- 
nasty to the British throne as the house of Braun- 
schweig. It is as cacaphonous in sound as would be 
the house of Physic-bottles, instead of the house of 
Medici, but our Teuton friends seem to have a genius 
for uglifying high-sounding names. They call El- 
sinore (Hamlet's Elsinore) Helsingborg ; Vienna, 
Wien ; Munich, Miinchen ; Cologne, Koln, and the 
Crimea, Krim. Can there be any thing noble, proper 
to a famous battle-field where the bones of heroes 
lie whitening in the word Krim ? 

The Frenchman, who was a fool, left us at the 
Prussian fortress town of Magdebourg, where also 
the Englishman (who was any thing but a fool, a 
thorough man of the world, in fact, and of whom I 
intend you to hear further in the course of these 
travels) also bade me adieu at this station. Then I 
was left alone in my glory to ponder over the his- 
torical places I had been hurried through since six 
o'clock that morning ; I thought of Diisseldorf, and 



20 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

Overbeck the painter, of the battle of Minden, and 
the Duke of Cumberland and Lord George Sack- 
ville; of Hanover, Gagrge the First and his bad 
oysters ; of Magdeboilfg and Baron Trenck, till I 
went to sleep, and waking found myself at Potsdam. 
I found that I had another travelling companion 
here in the person of a magnificent Incarnation, all 
ringleted, oiled, scented, dress-coated, and watered- 
silk-faced, braided, frogged, ringed, jewelled, patent- 
leathered, amber-headed sticked, and straw-colored 
kid-gloved, who had travelled in the same train, from 
Cologne, but had been driven out of the adjoining 
carriage, he said by the execrable fumes of the Ger- 
man cigars, and now was good enough to tolerate 
me, owing to a mild and undeniably Havana cigar 
I lighted. This magnificent creature shone like a 
meteor in the narrow carriage. The lamp mirrored 
itself in his glistening equipment ; his gloves and 
boots fitted so tightly, that you felt inclined to think 
that he had varnished 'his hands straw-color, and his 
feet black. There was not a crease in his fine linen, 
a speck of dust on his superfine Saxony sables, his 
waxed-moustachioes and glossy ringlets. I felt 
ashamed, embaled as I was in rugs and spatter- 
dashes, and a fur cap, and a courier's pouch, all 
dusty and travel-stained, when I contemplated this 
bandbox voyageur^ so spruce and kempt, the only 
sign of whose being away from home, was a mag- 
nificent mantle lined with expensive furs, on the 
seat beside him, and who yet, he told me, had been 
travelling incessantly for six days. He talked with 
incessant volubility in the French and English 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 21 

tongues ; the former seemed to be his native one ; 
he knew everybody and everything I knew ; he had 
started the journal from w^ich I was accredited, 
and was the promoter of the club of which I was 
an unworthy member ; and as to myself, he knew 
me intimately, so he said, though may I have six 
years' penal servitude with Lieutenant Austin late 
of Birmingham jail as Hulk Inspector if I had ever 
spoken to him before in my life ; and a great many 
things and people I did not know. He seemed per- 
sonally acquainted with every musical inst];ument 
and musician, from the piper that played before 
Moses to the Messrs. Distin and their Saxhorns. I 
began to fancy as he proceeded, that he must be 
that renowned and eccentric horn-player and mysti- 
ficateur, who travels about Europe, Asia, Africa, 
America, Australia, and other parts of the world, 
accompanied by a white game-cock, and who was 
once mistaken for a magician by the Greeks of Syra 
through his marvellous feat of blowing soap-bubbles 
with tobacco-smoke inside them. I was in error, 
however. I learnt the wondrous creature's name 
before I reached Berlin ; but although he refrained 
from binding me to secrecy, this is not the time nor 
place in which to reveal it. 

Ten thirty p. m., a wild sweep through a sandy 
plain thinly starred with lights ; then thickening 
masses of human habitations ; then brighter corus- 
cations of gas-lamps, and — Berlin. Here I am re- 
ceived with all the honours of war. Two grim 
guards with gleaming bayonets impress me, if they 
do not awe me, on the platform, as the carriage-door 



22 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

is flung open ; and a very tall and fierce police- 
officer in a helmet demands my passport. I observe 
that the continental governments always keep the 
policemen with the longest moustachioes, the largest 
bodies, and the most ferocious general aspect, at the 
frontier towns and railway termini. You always 
see the elite of the municipal force, the prize police- 
men, when you enter a foreign country, and those in 
power have a decided eye to effect. Behold me 
here, exactly half-way in my expedition Due North 
— whi^h is not due north by-the-by, but rather 
northeast. 

Behold me, come post-haste to Berlin, and half 
my journey due north accomplished. Now, when 
the northern end looms in sight, I find myself 
brought to a standstill. This is the twenty-seventh 
of April, and the flowers in England must be look- 
ing out their summer suits, yet here I am literally 
firozen up. It was my design, on quitting L<1!)tidon, 
to proceed, vi^ Berlin, to Stettin in Pomerania, and 
there to take the first steamer to St. Petersburg. 
Here is my fare, sixty-two dollars in greasy Prussian 
notes — like curl-papers smoothed out — here is *ni|^ 
Foreign- Office passport, not vise yet for Russia, but 
which to-morrow will be ; here are my brains and 
my heart, bounding, yearning, for Muscovite impres- 
sions ; and there, at Stettin-on-the-Oder, is the Post- 
DampfschifF Preussischer-Adler or Fast Mail-packet 
Prussian Eagle. What prevents the combination of/ 
these things carrying me right away to Cronstadt ? 
What but my being frozen up ? What but the ice 
in the Gulf of Finland ? 



% 



% 



I BEGIN MY JOUENEY. 23 

In a murky office in Mark Lane, London, where 
I first made my inquiries into Muscovite matters, 
the clerks spoke hopefully of the northern navigation 
being perfectly free by the end of April. In Brussels, 
weather-wise men, bound Russia-wards, were quite 
'sanguine as to the first day of May being first open 
water. But in Berlin, people began to shake their 
heads, and whisper ugly stories about the ice ; and 
many advised me to take a run down to Leipzig 
and Dresden, and see the Saxon Switzerland ; tell- 
ing me significantly that I would have ample time 
to explore all central Germany before the northern 
waters were ruffled by the keel even of a cock-boat. 
There was a little band of Britons purposing for 
Petersburg at the table d'hote of the Hotel de Russie, 
at Berlin, of whom I had the advantage to make 
one; and we fed ourselves from day to day (after 
dinner) with fallacious hopes of early steamers. A 
Ro maw- citizen in a buff waistcoat, and extensively 
interested in tallow, (so at least it was whispered, 
thougl^the Fumden Blad said merely Shortsix, 
Kaufmann aus Ens^land, and was silent as to his 
specJialty,) was perfectly certain that a steamboat 
would start from Stockholm for Cronstadt on the 
fourth of May, and he expressed his determination 
to secure a passage by her ; but as Sweden happens 
to be on the other side of the Baltic, and there was 
no bridge, and no water communication yet opened 
therewith, the Stockholm steamer was a thing to be 
looked at (in lithography, framed and glazed in the 
hall of the hotel) and longed for, rather than em- 
barked in. We were all of us perpetually haunted 



24 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

by a sort of phantom steamer-^a very flying Russian 
— commanded, I presume, by Captain Vanderdeck- 
enovitch, whose departure some one had seen adver- 
tised in an unknown newspaper. This spectral craft 
was reported to have left HuU some time since — ^we 
all agreed that the passage-money out was nine 
guineas, inclusive of provisions of the very best 
quality, but exclusive of wines, liquors, and the 
steward's fee, and she was to call (after doubling 
the cape, I presume) at Kiel, Lubeck, Copenhagen, 
Konigsberg ; Jerusalem, Madagascar, and North 
and South Amerikee, for aught I know. To find 
this ghostly bark, an impetuous Englishman — a 
north countryman with a head so fiery in hue that 
they might have put him on a post and made a 
lighthouse of him, and pendant whiskers like car- 
riage rugs, started off by the midnight mail to 
Hamburg. He came back in three days and a 
towering rage, saying that there was ice even in 
the Elbe, and giving us to understand that the free 
cities of Hamburg, Lubeck, and Bremen, had con- 
curred in laughing him to scorn at the bare mention 
of a steamer due north — yet awhile at least. By 
degrees a grim certainty broke upon us, and settled 
itself convincingly in our minds. To the complexioii 
of the Preussischer-Adler we must come ; and that 
Post-DampfschifF would start from Stettin on Satur- 
day, the seventeenth of May, at noon, and not one 
day or hour before. 

I thought the three long weeks would never have 
come to an end. I might, had I been differently 
situated, have taken my fill of enjoyment in Berlin, 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 25 

and spent three pleasant weeks there. Unter den 
Linden, the Thier- Garten, Charlottenbourg, Pots- 
dam, Krotts, the Tonhalle, Sans Souci, and Mon- 
bijou (pronounced Zang Zouzp and Mongpichow) 
are quite sufficient to, make a man delectably com- 
fortable on the spree : to say nothing of the art 
treasure-stored Museum, Rauch's statue of the Great 
Frederic, Kiss's Amazon, and the sumptuous Opera- 
haus, with Johanna Wagner in the Tanhaiiser, and 
Marie Taglioni in Satanella. But they were all 
caviare to the million of Prussian blue devils which 
possessed me. I felt that I had no business in Ber- 
lin — ^that I had no right to applaud Fraulein "Wag- 
ner — ^that I ought to reserve my kid-glove reverbera- 
tions for Mademoiselle Bagdanoff : that every walk 
I took Unter den Linden was so many paces robbed 
from the Nevsky Perspective, and that every sight I 
took at the King of Prussia and the Princes of the 
House of Hohenzollern was a fraud on my liege lit- 
erary masters, the Emperor of Russia and the scions 
of the house of Romanoff. 

Conscience-stricken as I felt, though void of guilt, 
I had my consolations — few and spare, but grateful 
as Esmeralda's cup to the thirst-tortured Quasimodo. 
I heard the Oberon of Karl Maria von Weber per- 
formed with such a fervour and solemnity of sincer- 
ity, listened to with such rapt attention and reverent 
love — drunk up by a thousand greedy ears, bar by 
bar, note by note — from the first delicious horn- 
murmur in the overture to the last crash in the 
triumphant march, in the finale, that I began at 
last to fancy that I was in a Cathedral instead of 
2 



26 A JOUKNEY DUE NORTH. 

a theatre, and half expected the congregation — I 
mean the people — to ki^el when the bell rang for 
the fall of the curtain, and the brilliant lamps grew 
pale. An extra gleam of consolation was imparted 
to me, too, when I read in the Schauspiel-zettely or 
play-bill, the printed avowal that the libretto of the 
opera had been into High Dutch rendered from the 
English of the Herr-Poem-Konstruktor J. R. Planche. 
Again ; I saw the Faust of Wolfgang von Goethe — 
the Faust as a tragedy, in all its magnificent and 
majestic simplicity. I don't think I clearly compre- 
hended fifty phrases of the dialogue ; I could scarce- 
ly read the names of the dramatis personae in the 
play-bill ; and yet I would not have missed that per- 
formance for a pile of ducats ; nor shall I ever forget 
the actor who played Mephistopheles. His name is 
a shadow to me now ; the biting wit, the searching 
philosophy, the scathing satire in his speech were 
wellnigh Greek to me ; but the hood, the gait, the 
gestures, the devil's grin, the vibrating voice, the red 
cock's feather, the long peaked shoes, the sardoni- 
cally up-turned moustache, will never be erased from 
my mind, and will stand me in good stead for com- 
mentaries when (in the week of the three Thursdays, 
I suppose) I take heart of grace and sit down to 
study the giant of "Weimar's masterpiece in the 
original. There was a pretty, blue-eyed, rosy-lipped 
Marguerite, whose hair had a golden sheen perfectly 
wondrous ; and Faust would have been a senseless 
stock not to have fallen in love with her ; but, ,alas ! 
she was too fat, and looked as if she ate too much ; 
and when she wept for Faust gave me far more the 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 27 

impression that she was crying because, like the 
ebony patriarch Tucker, familiarly hight Dan, she 
was too late for her supper. Still, I came away 
from Faust almost happy. 

There might, perchance, at other times be a surly 
pleasure in the discovery that Berlin gloves are ap- 
parently unknown at Berlin — even as there are no 
French rolls in Paris — and that Berlin wool is very 
little sought after. There might have been some 
advantage gained to science by an attempt to an- 
alyze the peculiar smell of the capital of Prussia, 
which, to uninitiated noses, seems compounded of 
volatile essence of Cologne, (not the eaw, but the 
streets thereof,) multiplied by sewer, plus cesspool, 
plus Grande Rue de Pera, plus Rue de la Tixeran- 
derie after a shower of rain, plus port of Marseilles 
at any time, plus London eating-house, plus Vaux- 
hall bone-boiling establishment, plus tallow factory, 
plus low lodging-house in Whitechapel, plus dissect- 
ing-rooms, plus the " gruel thick and slab " of Mac- 
beth's witches when it began to cool.* There might 
have been a temporary relief in expatiating on the 
geological curiosities of Berlin, the foot-lacerating 
pavement, and the Sahara-like sandy plain in which 
the city is situate. There might have been a tem- 
porary excitement, disagreeable but salubrious, in 
losing, as I did, half my store of Prussian notes in 
a cabj and cooling my heels for three successive 
days at the Police Preesidium in frantically-fruitless 

* It Is doubtful wliether tliis description, ■written nearly two 
years ago, would not now more aptly apply to Father Thames. 



28 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

inquiries (in very scanty German) after my departed 
treasure — but there wasn't ; no, not one atom. 
Though the Hotel de E-ussie boasted as savoury a 
table-d'hote as one would wish to find, likewise 
Rhine wine exhilarating to the palate and soothing 
to the soul, I began to loathe my food and drink. I 
longed for Russian caviare and Russian vodki. I 
came abroad to eat candles and drink train-oil — or, 
at least, the equivalent for that which is popularly 
supposed to form the favourite food of our late ene- 
mies — and not to feast on Bisque soup and supreme 
de volaille. Three weeks ! they seemed an eternity. 

The maestro whom I met at Potsdam, went back 
to Cologne cheerfully ; he was not bound for the 
land of the Russ ; and, having accomplished the ob- 
ject of his mission — which I imagine to have been 
the engagement of a few hundred fiddlers — departed 
in a droschky, his straw-coloured kids gleaming in 
the sunshine, and wishing me joy of my journey to 
St. .Petersburg. ShaU I ever get there, I wonder? 
The Englishman, who was a man of the world, 
didn't come back. He of the red head (Mr. Eddy- 
stoned christened him from his beacon-like hair) took 
rail for Konigsberg, to see if there was anything in 
the steam-vessel line to be done there, and the buff 
waistcoat, who was commercially interested in tal- 
low, boldly announced his determination not to 
stand it any longer, but to be off to St. Petersburg 
overland. 

Overland ! and why could not I also go overland ? 
The railway, I reasoned, will take me as far as this 
same Konigsberg, and proceeding thence by way of 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 29 

Tilsit, Tauroggen, Mittau, Riga, and Lake Tschudi, 
I can reach the much-desired Petropolis. There is 
the malle-poste^ or diligence ; there is the extra-post ; 
there is the private kibitka^ which I can purchase, 
or hire, and horse at my own charges from stage to 
stage. The journey should properly occupy about 
six days. About ! but a wary and bronzed queen's 
messenger, who converses with me (he ought to 
know something, for he is on the half-pay of the 
dragoons, is a lord's neph'ew and the cousin of a 
secretary of state, spent fifty thousand pounds be- 
fore he was five-and-twenty, and is now ceaselessly 
wandering up and down on the face of the earth 
with a red dispatch-box, six hundred a-year, and his 
expenses paid) — the queen's messenger, bronzed and 
wary, shakes his head ominously. When the winter 
breaks up in Russia, he remarks, the roads break up 
too, and the travellers break down. He has often 
been overland himself, perforce, (where hasn't he 
been ?) in winter ; and he has such marrow-freezing 
stories to tell (all in a cool, jaunty, mess-room-soft- 
ened-by-experience manner,) of incessant travelling 
by day and night, of roads made up of morasses, 
sand-hills, and deep gullies, of drunken drivers, of 
infamous post-houses, swarming with all the plagues 
of Egypt, naturalized Russian subjects ; of atro- 
ciously extortionate Jew postmasters ; of horses — 
rum ones to look at, and rummer, or worse ones, to 
go ; of frequent stoppages for hours together ; of an 
absolute dearth of anything wholesome to eat or 
drink, save bread and tea. He enlarges so much on 
the bruisings, bumpings, joltings, and dislocations to 



30 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

which the unfortunate victim of the nominally six, 
but more frequently twelve days' overland route is 
subject, that I bid the project avaunt like an ugly 
phantom, and, laying it in the Baltic Sea, determine 
to weather out the time as well as I can, till the sev- 
enteenth. 

I can't stop any longer in Berlin, however, that is 
certain. So I drive out of the Oraneinberg Gate, 
and cast myself into a railway carriage, which, in 
its turn, casts me out at Stettin-on-the-Oder, eighty- 
four miles distant. And on the banks of that fear- 
some River Oder I pass May-day. In the Oder, too, 
I find the steamer in which, at some far remote pe- 
riod of my existence, I suppose I am to occupy a 
berth. I find the " Preussischer Adler ; " but woe is 
me ! she has taken to her bed in a graving-dock, 
and is a pitiable sight to see. There being some- 
thing the matter with her boilers, they have dismast- 
ed her, leaving her nothing but clumsy stumps like 
wooden legs. They are scraping her all over, for 
some cutaneous disorder with which she is afflicted , 
I presume, and they are recoppering her bottom, — 
an operation which German shipwrights appear to 
me to perform with gum-arabic, Dutch metal, and 
a camel's-hair pencil. Altogether the " Prussian 
Eagle " looks such a woe-begone, moulting, tailless, 
broken-beaked bird, and so very unlike going to 
Cronstadt, that I flee from her in dismay ; and 
boarding the " Geyser," which is trim, taut, and 
double-funnelled, steam swiftly through the Haf See 
to Swinemunde, and then across the East Sea to 
Copenhagen. 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 31 

Plenty of time {miserere me !) to see all that is to 
be seen in the chief city of Denmark ; to take the 
English company's railway to R-oeskilde ; to cross 
over to Malmoe in Sweden ; to go back to Stettin — 
to the devil, I think, if this lasts much longer. 
There is a horrible persuasion forcing itself upon me 
now — that I live in Berlin : that my goal is there. 
Back to Berlin I go. Letters are waiting for me. 
People I didn't know from Adam a month ago, and 
don't care a silbergroschen for, offer to kiss me on 
both cheeks, and welcome me home. I suppose by 
this time I am a Prussian subject, and shall have to 
serve in the landwehr. Between that and blowing 
one's brains out there is not much difference. 

I go back to Stettin, where I have a touch of the 
overland longing again (it is now the tenth of May), 
and a Jewish gentleman with an apple-green gabar- 
dine, lined with cat-skin, and a beard so ragged and 
torn, that I am led to surmise that he has himself 
despoiled the cats of their furry robes, and has suf- 
fered severely in the contest, is exceedingly anxious 
(he nosed me in the hotel lobby as an Englishman, 
within an hour of my arrival) that I should purchase 
a kibitka he has to sell. He only wants fifty thgilers 
for it ; it is a splendid kibitka, he says : — " sehr 
hubsch, schrecklich ! wunderschbn " — ^so I go to look 
at it ; for I feel just in the sort of mood to buy a 
kibitka, or an elephant, a diving-bell, a mangle, an 
organ with an insane monkey to grind it, and throw 
myself into the Oder immediately afterwards. I 
look at the kibitka, which I am to horse from stage 
to stage, and I deserve to be horsed myself if I buy 



82 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

it, SO lamentable an old shandrydan is it. I quarrel 
with the Jew in the cat-skins on the subject, who 
calls me lord, and sheds tears. Finding that I am 
determined not to throw away my thalers on his 
kibitka, he, with the elasticity in commercial trans- 
actions common to his nation, proposes that I should 
become the possessor of a splendid dressing-case 
with silver mountings ; but on my remaining proof 
against this temptation, as well as against that of a 
stock of prime Hungarian tobacco, which is to be 
sold for a mere song, he changes blithely from seller 
to buyer, and generously offers to purchase at advan- 
tageous rates, and for ready money, any portion of 
my wardrobe I may consider superfluous. He is 
not in the least offended when I bid him go hang, in 
the English language, and walk away moodily — 
calling after me in cheerful accents (by the title of 
Well-born Great British Sir) that he has a fine 
English bull-pup to dispose of, dirt-cheap. 

After this, I have another look at the " Preussis- 
cher Adler," which, by this time, has been turned, 
for coppering purposes, nearly keel upwards, and 
looks as if she had abandoned herself to despair, as 
I have. Walk the streets of Stettin I dare not, for 
I am pursued by the hideous spectre of Thomas Til- 
der aus Tyrol, of whom more anon. Yes, Thomas, 
in these pages shall you, like noxious bat on barn- 
door, be spread out with nails of type! And, as for 
Berlin, I am ashamed to show my face there again. 
The very clerks at the station seem to think it quite 
time for me to be in R-ussia ; and I am afraid the 
head waiter at the Hotel de Russie took it very ill 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 33 

that I came back last time. Yet I journey there, 
and back, and there again ; and in one of my jour- 
neys to Berlin I have my passport made good for 
Russia. The process is a solemn and intricate one, 
and merits a few words of notice. There is plenty 
of time ; they are hammering away at the Prussian 
Eagle's boilers yet. First, with great fear and trem- 
bling, I go to the hotel of the Russian embassy, 
which is a tremendous mansion, as big as a castle, 
under the Linden. I have borne the majority of 
Foreign Legations abroad with tolerable equanim- 
ity ; but I am quite overcome here by the grandeur, 
and the double eagle over the gate, and the vastness 
of the court-yard, and the odour of a diplomatic din- 
nerj which is being cooked (probably in stew-pans 
of gold from the Ural mountains) ; but I am espe- 
cially awed by a house-porter, or Suisse, of gigantic 
stature, possibly the largest Suisse that ever human 
ambassador possessed. He is not exactly like a 
beadle, nor a drum-major, nor an archbishop, (he 
wears a gold-embroidered alb) nor a field-marshal, 
nor garter king-at-arms, nor my lord on May-day, 
but is something between all these functionaries in 
appearance. He has a long gilt-headed pole in his 
hand, much more like the " mast of some tall am- 
miral," than a Christian staff; and when I ask him 
the way to the passport-office, he magnanimously 
refrains from ejaculating anything about Fee-fo- 
Fum, or smelling the blood of an Englishman ; and, 
instead of eating me up alive on the spot, or grind- 
ing my bones to make his bread, he tells me, in a 
deep bass voice, to enter the second door on the left 



34 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

through the court-yard, and mount two pair of stairs. 
Here, in but a seedy little bureau for so grand a 
mansion, I find a little round old gentleman in a 
grey flannel dressing-gown and a skull-cap, who 
looks more like my Uncle Toby than a Russian, 
offers me snuff from his box, (a present from the 
czar, perhaps,) and courteously desires to know 
what he can do for me. I explain my errand ; upon 
which the little old gentleman shakes his head with 
Burleigh-like sagacity, as if granting a vise to a 
passport were no light matter, and, securing my 
papers, begs me to call again at three o'clock the 
following day. I call again at the appointed time, 
when it appears that the little old gentleman — or, at 
least, his diplomatic chiefs — have no orders, as yet, 
to admit English subjects into Russia; so there are 
telegraphic messages to be sent to Warsaw, where 
Count GortschakofF is, and who most courteously 
telegraphs back, '* By all means : " * and there are 
papers to be signed, and declarations to be made, 
and there is the deuce and alLto pay. When all 
these formalities have been satisfactorily gone 
through, I begin to think it pretty nearly time for 
the passport to be ready, and ask for it; but the 

* In that meritorious philo-Russian organ, the Nord, I saw, a 
few days since, an anecdote, apropos of telegraphic despatches, 
which, I think, will bear translation. Lord Granville, according 
to the Nord, had commissioned one Sir Acton to engage a house 
at Moscow for him. Sir Acton telegraphs to Lord Granville to 
know whether the terms demanded for the house will suit his 
lordship, whereupon Lord Granville telegraphs back, " Yes, my 
dear." 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. S^'' 

little old gentleman, shaking that head of his with 
much suavity, suggests to-morrow at a quarter to 
four. The chief secretary of legation, he says, is at 
Charlottenbourg, dining with the king, and without 
his signature the passport is not valid. I call again ; 
but I suppose the secretary must be taking tea with 
some other member of the royal family, for no pass- 
port do I receive, and another appointment is made. 
This time I see my passport bodily, lying on a table, 
and by the amount of Russian hieroglyphics and 
double-eagle stamps covering every available blank 
space on its surface, it ought surely, to my mind, to 
be good from Revel to Tobolsk. But it is noch nicht 
fertig — not yet ready — the little old gentleman says. 
He speaks nothing but German — so, at least, he 
blandly declares ; yet I notice that he pricks his ears 
up sharply, and that his eyes twinkle, when an irate 
Frenchman, whose errand is the same as mine (only 
he has been waiting ten days) denounces the Rus- 
sians, in his native tongue, as a nation de harbares. 
I begin myself to get exceedingly cross, and impa- 
tient to know when I am to have the precious docu- 
ment ; whereupon the little old gentleman looks at 
me curiously, as if he didn't quite understand what 
I meant, or perhaps as if I didn't quite understand 
his meaning. 

" Where do you live in Berlin ? " he asks, sud- 
denly. 

I tell him that I am stopping at the Hotel de 
Russie, in which with a smile of five-hundred-diplo- 
matist power, he makes me a bow, and tells me he 
will have the honour of bringing me the passport 



36 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

this present evening, at six o'clock. I ask if there is 
any charge for the vise; but, with another smile that 
would set a sphynx up in business on the spot, so 
inscrutable is it, he assures me that the vise is Gra- 
tis, gratis, and bows me out. I go home to dinner, 
and discourse to Mr. Erenreich on my passport trib- 
ulations. 

" When he comes this evening," says this worthy 
landlord, " you had better give him a thaler at once. 
Otherwise you may perhaps find that he has left the 
passport at the Legation, and that it is impossible 
to obtain it before to-morrow." 

The little old gentleman is punctual to his ap- 
pointment, and I no sooner catch sight of him in the 
darkened salle a manger, than I hasten to slip the 
necessary note into his hand. He makes me a pro- 
fusion of bows, and gives me my passport, — g-utt 
nach Russland as he expresses it. " Ghitt nach Russ- 
landP When I spread the passport on the table, 
and recall the little old gentleman's words, I can't 
help feeling somewhat of a thrill. " Gutt nach Russ- 
land^^ — here are the double eagles, and the para- 
graphs scrawled in unknown characters, and my 
name (I presume) in such an etymological disguise 
that my wisest child, had I one, would despair of 
recognizing his own father in it. Yet the expen- 
diture of three shillings has made me " good for 
Russia." But yesterday there was a gulf of blood 
and fire, and the thunder of a thousand guns be- 
tween England and Eussia! the Ultima Thule of 
St. Petersburg was as inaccessible to an English- 
man as Mecca or Japan, and now, lo, a scrap of a 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 37 

stamped paper and a few pieces of gold will carry 
me through the narrow channel, that, ten months 
ago, the British government would have given mil- 
lions to be able to float one gun-boat on. 

" Itsch chost von Daler^^^ says the commissionnaire 
with the umbrella. What he should want a Prus- 
sian dollar from me for, or why, indeed, he should 
exact any thing, passes my comprehension. He 
walked into my bedroom at the Drei Kronen this 
morning, at a dreadfully early hour, with his hat on, 
and his umbrella (a dull crimson in hue) under his 
arm. He bade me good morning in a cavalier man- 
ner, and informed me that he was the commission- 
naire, to which I retorted that he might be the Pope, 
but that I wanted none of his company. The boots 
was packing my luggage, and he superintended the 
process with a serenely patronizing air, thinking 
possibly, that on the principle that " V ceil du maitre 
engraisse le clieval^'' it is the eye of the commis- 
sionnaire that cords the trunks. Finding me indis- 
posed for conversation (I had taken some genuine 
Russian caviare for breakfast with a view of accli- 
matizing myself early, and was dreadfully sick), he 
took himself and umbrella off" to another apartment, 
and the boots expressed his opinion to me (in strict 
confidence) that he, the commissionnaire, was a spitz- 
buhe. This is all he has done for me, and now he 
has the conscience to come to me and tell me that 
his charges are " chost von Daler.^^ He is author- 
ized, it appears, by somebody who does not pay the 
thalers himself, to extort them from other people ; 
and he points, with conscious pride, to some tar- 



38 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

nished buttons on his waistcoat on which the Rus- 
sian eagle is manifest. 

Why do I give the commissionnaire the thaler he 
demands, and to which he has no sort of right ? 
Why do I feel inclined to give two, three dollars, to 
invite him to partake of schnapps, to cast myself on 
his neck, and assure him that I love him as a 
brother ? Why, because to-day is Saturday, the 
seventeenth of May, eleven o'clock in the forenoon, 
and I am standing on the deck — the quarter-deck, 
ye gods ! — of the " Preussischer Adler," which good 
pyroscaphe has got her steam up to a maddening 
extent, and in another hour's time will leave the 
harbour of Stettin for Cronstadt. 

New tail-feathers, new wing-feathers, new beak, 
new claws, has the " Preussischer Adler." A brave 
bird. There is nothing the matter with her boilers 
now, her masts are tapering, her decks snow-white, 
and I have no doubt that her copper glistens like 
burnished gold, and that the mermaids in the Baltic 
will be tempted to purloin little bits of the shining 
metal to deck their weedy tresses withal. A bran 
new flag of creamy tinge floats at her stern, and on 
it is depicted with smart plumage, and beak and 
claws of gold, an eagle of gigantic dimensions. 
And this is the last eagle with one head that I shall 
see on this side Jordan. 

Every thing seems to be new on board. The 
saloon is gorgeous in crimson velvet, and mirrors, 
and mahogany and gold. There are the cleanest of 
sheets, the rosiest of counterpanes, the most coquet- 
tish of chintz curtains to the berths. All the crock- 



I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 89 

ery is new. All the knives and forks are new ; and 
though I discover afterwards that they won't cut, 
they are delightfully shiny. There is a library of 
new books in a new rosewood case, and there is a 
new cabinet piano, tuned up to nautical-concert 
pitch, and whose keys when struck clang as sharply 
as the tongue of an American steamboat clerk. The 
stewards, of whom there are a goodly number, are 
all clad in glossy new uniforms of a fancy naval 
cut, and look like midshipmen at a Vauxhall mas- 
querade. There is a spacious galley for cooking 
purposes, full of the brightest cooking utensils ; a 
titillating odour issues therefrom, and there are four 
cooks, yea four, all in professional white. One has 
an imperial and gold watch-chain, one is flirting 
with the stewardess, (who is young, pretty, flounced, 
and wears her hair after the manner of the Empress 
Eugenie,) a third is smoking a paper cigarette, (quite 
the gentleman,) while the last, reclining in a grove 
of stewpans, is studying attentively a handsomely- 
bound book. What can it be ? Newton's Prin- 
cipia, Victor Hugo's Contemplations, the Cuisinier 
Royal, or the Polite Letter-writer ? " The Preus- 
sischer Adler," be it known, like her sister vessel the 
Vladimir, is an intensely-aristocratic boat. Both 
are commanded by officers respectively of the Prus- 
sian (!) and Russian (! !) navies. The fare by the 
Prussian Eagle is enormously high ; nine guineas 
for a sixty hours' passage. On payment of this ex- 
orbitant honorarium she will carry such humble 
passengers as myself ; but the ordinary travellers per 
" Preussischer Adler " are princes of the empire, 



40 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

grand-dukes, arch-electors, general-lieutenants, am- 
bassadors, senators, councillors of state. And as for 
ladies — tenez ! — the best edition of Almack's Re- 
visited is to be found on board a Stettin steamboat. 
I start at the wrong end of the season to travel with 
the grandees, however. For this being the com- 
mencement of the navigation and of Peace besides, 
the Russian aristocracy are all hurrying away from 
St. Petersburg as fast as ever they can obtain pass- 
ports. The Vladimir, they tell me, has all her 
berths engaged up to the middle of July next, and 
the Prussian Eagle is in equal demand. 

I should perhaps be more unexceptionably satis- 
fied with the Adler's arrangements, if her crew 
would not persist in wearing moustaches and Hes- 
sian boots with the tassels cut off. It is not nau- 
tical. A boatswain, too, with stripes down his 
trousers, is to me an anomaly. I must dissent, too, 
from the system of stowing passengers' luggage per 
" Preussischer Adler." The manner of it appears .to 
be this : a stalwart porter, balancing a heavy trunk 
on his shoulder, advances along the plank which 
leads from the wharf to the ship's side. He ad- 
vances jauntily, as though he were not unaccus- 
tomed to dance a.coranto. Arrived at the brink of 
the abyss, he stops, expectorates, bandies a joke in 
High Dutch with a compatriot who is mending his 
trousers in an adjacent barge, and bending slightly, 
pitches the trunk head foremost into the hold. 

There is, I need scarcely say, a tremendous fuss 
and to-do with papers and policemen before we start, 
calling over names, verification or legitimation of 



I AM ABOAED THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 41 

passports, as it is called by the K,ussian consul, et 
cetera, et cetera ; but I will say this, in honour of 
the " Preussischer Adler's " punctuality, that as the 
clock strikes noon we cast off from our moorings, 
and steam away through the narrow Oder. At 
Swinemunde I see the last of Prussia ; henceforth I 
must be- of Russia and Russian. 



11. 

I AM ABOAED THE PEUSSIAN EAGLE. 

The feeling may be one of pure cockneyism, as 
puerile as when one sees a ship on the sea for the 
first time, but I cannot help it ; I have a pleasure, 
almost infantine, when I remind myself that I am 
no longer performing a trite steamboat voyage on 
the Thames, the Seine, the Rhine, the ^Scheldt, or 
the Straits of Dover, but that I am in verity jour- 
neying on the bosom of the Baltic ; that we have 
left the coast of Denmark far behind ; that that low 
long strip of land yonder cingling the horizon is the 
Swedish island of Gothland, and that, by to-morrow 
at daybreak, we may expect to enter the Gulf of 
Finland. 

Dear reader, if you are, as I hope, a lover of the 
story-books, would not your heart sing, and your 
soul be gladdened — ^would not you clap your hands 



42 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

for joy — ay, at fifty years of age, and in High 
Change, if you were to be told some fine morning 
that the story-books had come True, every one of 
them ? That a livery-stable keeper's horse in Barbi- 
can had that morning put out the eye of a calender, 
son of a king, with a whisk of his tail; that Mr. 
Mitchell, of the Zoological Society, had just re- 
ceived a fine roc per Peninsular and Oriental Com- 
pany's steamer; that there were excursions every 
day from the Waterloo station to the Valley of 
Diamonds; that Mr. Farrance of Spring Garden 
(supposing that eminent pastry cooking firm to have 
an individual entity) had been sentenced to death 
for making cream tarts without pepper, but had been 
respited on the discovery that he was the long-lost 
prince Moureddin Hassan ; that several giants had 
been slain in Wales by Lieutenant-general Jack; 
that the Forty Thieves were to be tried at the next 
session of the Central Criminal Court ; that a genii 
had issued from the smoke of a saucepan at Mr. 
Simpson's fish ordinary in Billingsgate; that the 
Prince of Wales had awakened a beautiful princess, 
who had been asleep, with all her household, in an 
enchanted palace in some woods and forests in the 
Home Park, Windsor; and that a dwarfish gentle- 
man, by the name of Rumpelstiltskin, had lately had 
an audience of her most gracious Majesty, and 
boldly demanded the last of the royal babies as a 
reward for his services in cutting the Koh-i-noor 
diamond? Who would not forego a Guildhall ban- 
quet for the pleasure of a genuine Barmecide feast ? 
who would not take an express train to Wantley, if 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 43 

he could be certain that the real original dragon, 
who swallowed up the churches, and the cows, and 
the people, was to be seen alive there ? When I 
was a little lad, the maps were my story-books. 
The big marble-paper covered atlas, only to be 
thumbed on high days and holidays, had greater 
charms for me than even Fox's Martyrs or the 
Seven Champions. With this atlas and a paunchy 
volume with a piecrust cover (was it Brookes' or 
Maunder's Gazetteer ?) what romances I wove I 
what poems I imagined ! what castles in the air I 
built! what household words I made of foreign 
cities ! what subtle knowledge I had of the three 
Arabias, — Arabia Petra, Arabia Deserta, and Arabia 
Felix ! How I longed for the time when I should 
be big enough to go to Spain (shall I ever be big 
enough to make that journey, I wonder ?) — ^what 
doughty projects I formed against the day when I 
should be enabled to travel on an elephant in Ben- 
gal, and a reindeer in Lapland, and a mule in the 
Pyrenees, and an ostrich in Kabylia, and a crocodile 
in Nubia, like Mr. Watertown ! But my special 
story-book was that vast patch on the map of Eu- 
rope marked 'Kussia. In Europe, quotha ! did not 
Russia stretch far, far into Asia, and farther still into 
America ? I never was satiated with this part of 
the atlas. There was perpetual winter in Russia, 
of course. The only means of travelling was on a 
sledge across the snowy steppes. Packs of wolves 
invariably followed in pursuit, howling fearfully for 
prey. The traveller was always provided with a 
stock of live babies, whom he loved dearer than life 



44 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

itself, but whom he threw out, nevertheless, to the 
wolves, one by one, at half-mile distance or so. 
Then he threw out his lovely and attached wife (at 
her own earnest request, I need not say,) and then 
the wolves, intent on a third course, leaped into the 
sledge, and made an end of him. It used to puzzle 
me considerably as to how the horses escaped being 
eaten in the commencement, for the sledge always 
kept going at a tremendous rate ; and I was always 
in a state of ludicrous uncertainty as to the steppes 
— what they were made of, — wood, or stone, or turf; 
whether children ever sat on them with babies in 
their arms; (but the wolves would never have allowed 
that, surely !) and how many steps there were to a 
flight. There was attraction enough to me, good- 
ness knows, in the rest of the atlas ; in boot-shaped 
Italy; in Africa, huge and yellow as a pumpkin, 
and like that esculent, little excavated; in the Red 
Sea ; (why did they always colour it pea-green in the 
map ?) but the vasty Russia with its appurtenances 
was my great storehouse of romance. The Baltic 
was a continual wonder to me. How could ships 
ever get into it when there were the Great and Little 
Belts, and the Kraken, and the Maelstrom, and the 
icebergs, and the polar bears to stop the way. Rus- 
sia (on the map) was one vast and delightful region 
of mysteries, and adventures, and perilous expedi- 
tions ; a glorious wonder-land of czars who lived in 
wooden houses disguised as shipwrights; of Cos- 
sacks continually careering on long-maned ponies, 
and with lances like Maypoles ; of grisly bears, 
sweet-smelling leather, ducks, wolves, palaces of ice, 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 45 

forests, steppes, frozen lakes, caftans, long beards, 
Kremlins, and Ivan the Terribles. Never mind the 
knout ; never mind the perpetual winter ; never 
mind the passage of the Beresina, — I put Russia 
down in my juvenile itinerary as a place to be vis- 
ited, coute qui coute, as soon as I was twenty-one. 
I remember, when I was about half that age, travel- 
ling on the top of an omnibus from Mile End to the 
Bank with a philosophic individual in a red plaid 
cloak. He told me he had lived ten years in Russia 
(Rooshia, he pronounced it,) and gave me to under- 
stand confidentially that the czar ruled his subjects 
with a rod of iron. I grieved when he departed, 
though his conversation was but common-place. I 
followed him half-way up Cornhill, gazing at the red 
plaid skirts of his cloak flapping in the breeze, and 
revering him as one who had had vast and wonderful 
experiences, — as a Sindbad the Sailor, multiplied by 
Marco Polo. Oh, for my twenty-first birthday, and 
my aunt's legacy, and hey for Russia I 

The birthday and the legacy came and departed 
never to return again. I received sentence of im- 
prisonment within three hundred miles of London, 
accompanied by hard labour for the term of my 
natural life ; and though I was far from forgetting 
Russia — though a poor Silvio Pellico of a paper- 
stainer — I still cherished, in a' secret corner of my 
heart, a wild plan of escaping from the Speilberg 
some day, and travelling to my heart's content. 
Russia faded by degrees into the complexion of a 
story-book, to be believed in, furtively, but against 
reason and against hope. And this dreamy, legend- 



46 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ary state of feeling was not a little encouraged by 
the extraordinary paucity of fact, and the astonish- 
ing abundance of fiction to be found in all books I 
could obtain about Russia. Every traveller seemed 
to form a conception of the country and people 
more monstrous and unveracious than his predeces- 
sor ; and I really think that, but for the war, and the 
Prisoners at Lewes, and the Times Correspondent, 
I should have ended by acceding to the persuasion 
that Russia was none other than the Empire of 
Cockaigne, and the Emperor Nicholas the legitimate 
successor of Prester John. 

But, now, lo ! the story-book has come true ! This 
is real Russian writing on my passport; there are 
two live Russians playing Scarte on the poop, and I 
am steaming merrily through the real Baltic. We 
may see the Mirage this evening, the chief mate 
says, hopefully. We may be among the Ice to- 
morrow, says weather-worn Captain Smith (not 
Captain StefFens, he is too prudent to allude to such 
matters, but another captain — a honorary navigator) 
ominously. Ice, Mirage, and the Gulf of Finland! 
Are not these better than a cold day in the Strand, 
or a steamboat collision in the Pool ? 

We are only thirty passengers for Cronstadt, and 
the " Preussischer Adler " has ample accommodation 
for above a hundred. It may not be out of place, 
however, to remark, that there is an infinitely stronger 
desire to get out of this favoured empire than to get 
into it. There have been, even, I am told, some 
Russians born and bred under the beneficent rule of 
the autocrat, who, having once escaped from the 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 47 

land of their birth, have been altogether so wanting 
in patriotic feeling as never to return to it ; sted- 
fastly disregarding the invitations — nay, commands 
— of their government despatches through their 
chanceries in foreign countries. 

In Prussia and Denmark, and in my progress due 
north, generally, I had observed, when I happened 
to mention my intention of going to St. Petersburg, 
a peculiar curiosity to know the purport of my jour- 
ney thither, quite distinct from official inquisitive- 
ness. My interlocutor would usually ask " whether 
Monsieur sold ? " and when I replied that I did not 
sell any thing, he would parry the question, and in- 
quire " whether Monsieur bought ? " Then on my 
repudiation of any mercantile calling whatsoever, 
my questioner would hint that music-masters and 
tutors were very handsomely paid in Russia. I de- 
voted myself to the instruction, perhaps. No ; I did 
not teach any thing ; and, on this, my catechist after 
apparently satisfying himself from my modest ap- 
pearance, that I was neither an ambassador nor a 
secretary of legation, would shrug up his shoul- 
ders and give a low whistle, and me a look which 
might, with extreme facility, be translated into, 
" Que diahle allez-vous faire dans cette galere ? " 
I have never been in New England ; but, from the 
gauntlet of questions I had to run in Northern 
Europe, I believe myself qualified, when my time 
comes, to bear Connecticut with equanimity, and to 
confute the questionings of Massachusetts without 
difficulty. 

We are thirty passengers, as I have said, and we 



48 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

are commanded by Captain StefFens. Captain 
StefFens is red of face, blue of gills, black and shiny 
of hair, high of shirt-collar, and an officer of the 
royal Prussian navy. He will be Admiral StefFens, 
I doubt not, in the fulness of time, when the Prus- 
sian government has built a vessel large enough for 
him to hoist his flag in. About a quarter of an 
hour before we started, I had observed the red face 
and the high shirt-collar popping in and out — ^with 
Jack-in-the-box celerity — of a little state-room on 
the deck. I had previously been dull enough to 
take the first mate, who stood at the gangway, for 
the commander of the " Preussischer Adler," and to 
admire the tasteful variety of his uniform, composed 
as it was, of a monkey-jacket with gilt buttons, a 
sky-blue cap with a gold band, fawn-coloured trous- 
ers, and a tartan velvet waistcoat of a most distract- 
ing liveliness of pattern and colour. But it was 
only at the last moment that I was undeceived, and 
was made to confess how obtuse I had been ; for 
then, the state-room door flying wide open. Captain 
StefFens was manifest with the thirty passengers' 
passports in one hand, and a tremendous telescope 
in the other, and arrayed besides in all the glory of 
a light-blue frock, a white waistcoat, an astonishing 
pair of epaulettes of gold bullion, (" swabs," I be- 
lieve, they are termed in nautical parlance,) a shirt- 
firill extending at right angles from his manly breast, 
like a fan, and patent-leather boots. But why, Cap- 
tain StefFens, why, did you sufFer a navy cap with a 
gold-laced band to replace the traditional, the mar- 
tial, the becoming cocked-hat ? For with that tele- 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 49 

scope, that frill, those epaulettes, that rubicund 
visage, and that (missing) cocked-hat, Captain Stef- 
fens would have looked the very Fetch and coun- 
terfeit presentment of the immortal admiral who 
" came to hear on " the punishment of the faithless 
William Taylor by the " maiden fair and free," 
whom he had deserted, and which admiral not only 
" werry much applauded her for what she had done," 
but likewise appointed her to the responsible posi- 
tion of first lieutenant " of the gallant Thunder- 
bomb." 

But though unprovided with a cocked-hat. Cap- 
tain StefFens turns out to be a most meritorious 
commander. He takes oiF his epaulettes after we 
have left Swinemunde, and subsides into shoulder- 
straps ; but the long telescope never leaves him, and 
he seems to have an equal partiality for the thirty 
passports. He is always conning them over behind 
funnels, and in dim recesses of the forecastle ; and 
he seems to have a special penchant for perusing 
mine, and muttering my name over to himself, as if 
there were something wrong about me, or the fa- 
mous scrap of paper which has given me so much 
trouble. I step to him at last, and request to be 
permitted to enlighten him on any doubtful point 
he may descry. He assures me that all is right; 
but he confesses that passports are the bane of his 
existence. " Those people yonder," he whispers, 
motioning with his thumb towards where I sup- 
posed in the steamer's course is Cronstadt, " are the 
very deuce with passports, lieber HerrP And he 
sits on the pile of passports all dinner-time ; and, 

3 



60 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

just before I go to bed, I discover him peeping over 
them with the chief mate, by the light of the bin- 
nacle-lamp, and I will be sworn he has got mine 
again, holding it up to the light. 

Confound those passports ! It appears to me 
that the traveller who has his passport most in 
accordance with the rule and regulation is subject 
to the most annoyance. At Stettin I had to go to 
the Russian consul's bureau to procure a certificate 
of legitimation to my passport before they would 
give me my ticket at the steam-packet office. The 
Muscovite functionary looked at my Foreign -Office 
document with infinite contempt, and informed me 
that, being an English one, it was by no means 
valid in Russia. When I explained to him that it 
had been vise by his own ambassador at Berlin, he 
disappeared with it, still looking very dubious, into 
an adjoining apartment, which, from sundry hang- 
ings and mouldings, and the flounces of a silk dress 
which I espied through the half-opened door, I con- 
jecture to have been the boudoir of Madame la 
Consulesse. I suppose he showed the passport to 
his wife ; and, enlightened, doubtless, by her superior 
judgment, he presently returned radiant, saying that 
the passport was parfaitement en regie, and that it 
was charmant. I can see him now, holding my 
passport at arm's length, and examining the Rus- 
sian visd through his eye-glass with an air half criti- 
cal, half approving, as if it were some natural 
curiosity improved by cunning workmanship, and 
murmuring charmant meanwhile. He seemed so 
fond of it that it was quite a difficulty for him to 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 61 

give it me back again. He did so at last, together 
with the legitimation, which was an illegible 
scrawl on a scrap of paper like a pawnbroker's 
duplicate. I think his clerks must have known that 
my passport was in rule and charming, for they 
bestowed quite fraternal glances on me as I went 
out. To have a passport in regular order seems to 
be the only thing necessary to be thought great and 
wise and good in these parts ; and, when a virtuous 
man dies, I wonder they don't engrave on his tomb- 
stone that he was a tender father, an attached hus- 
band, and that *his passport was parfaitement en 
regie, 

I wish that, instead of being thirty passengers, we 
were only twenty-nine ; or, at all events, I devoutly 
wish that the thirtieth were any other than Captain 
Smith. He is a sea-captain ; what right has he to 
be in another man's vessel ? Where is his ship ? 
He has no right even to the name of Smith — he 
ought to be Smit, or Schmidt, for he tells me that 
he was born at Dantzig ; that it is only in the fourth 
generation that he can claim English descent. In- 
deed, he speaks English fluently enough, but with 
the accent of a Hottentot. When Captain Smith 
was an egg^ he must indubitably have been selected 
by that eminent nautical poultry-fancier. Mother 
Carey, for chicken-hatching purposes, and a full- 
feathered bird of ill-omen he has grown up to be. 
He has had a spite against the " Preussischer Ad- 
ler " from the outset ; and I hear him grumbling to 
himself or the Baltic Sea — it does not much matter 
which, for he is always communing with, one or the 



62 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

other — somewhat in this fashion : " Den dousand 
daler ! twenty dousand daler ! she gostet tinkering up 
dis time, and she not worth a tam ; no, not one 
tarn ; " and so on. He has a camp-stool on which 
he sits over the engine hatchway, casting baleful 
glances at the cylinders, and grumbling about the 
number of dalers they have " gostet," and that they 
are "not worth a tam." I find him examining a 
courier's bag I have purchased at Berlin, and evi- 
dently summing up its value by the curt but expres- 
sive phrase I have ventured to quote. I discover 
him counting, watch in hand, the number of revolu- 
tions per minute of the engines, and muttering dis- 
paraging remarks to the steward. He takes a vast 
quantity of solitary drams from a private bottle, 
openly declaring that the ship's stores are to be 
measured by his invariable standard of worthless- 
ness. Sometimes, in right of nautical freemasonry, 
he mounts the paddle-box bridge, and hovers over 
Captain StefFens (he is very tall) like an Old Man 
of the Sea, whispering grim counsel into that com- 
mander's ear, till Captain Steffens seems very much 
inclined to charge at him full butt with his long tel- 
escope, or to pitch him bodily into the Baltic. He 
haunts the deck at unholy hours, carrying a long pair 
of boots lined with sheepskin, which he incites the 
cook, with drams from his solitary bottle, to grease, 
and which he suspends, for seasoning, to forbidden 
ropes and stays. The subject on which he is espec- 
ially eloquent is a certain ship — "Schibb" he calls it 
— laden with madapolams, and by him, at some re- 
mote period of time, commanded, and which went 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 53 

down off the island of Oesel, or Oosel, or Weasel, in 
the year eighteen hundred and forty-nine. He brings 
a tattered chart of his own on deck, (for the ship's 
charts, he confidentially remarks, are not worth his 
favourite monosyllable,) and shows me the exact 
spot where the ill-fated vessel came to grief. " Dere 
I lose my schibb, year 'vorty-nine," he says. " Dere ; 
just vere my dumb is." (His dumb, or thumb, is a 
huge excrescence like a leech boiled down, and with 
a sable hat or nail-band.) " Dere de * Schon Jung- 
frau ' went down. Hans Schwieber was my mate, 
and de supercargo was a tarn tief." This rider to 
Falconer's " Shipwreck," and an interminable narra- 
tive about a certain Stevedore of the port of Revel, 
who had the property of getting drunk on linseed- 
oil, are his two great conversational hobby-horses. 
It is very easy to see that he predicts a fate similar 
to that of the " Schon Jungfrau " for the " Preussi- 
scher Adler." Prussian sailors, according to him, are 
good for nothing. He wants to know where Cap- 
tain StefFens passed his examination ; and he denies 
the possibility of the vessel steering well, seeing that 
the Baltic is full of magnetic islands, which cause 
the needle to fly round to all parts of the compass at 
once. To aggravate his imperfections, he wears a 
tall hat, grossly sinning against all the rules of nau- 
tical etiquette ; and he smokes the biggest and rank- 
est of Hamburg cigars, one of which, like an ill-fla- 
voured sausage, smoulders on the bench by his side 
all dinner-time. He evidently prefers the company of 
the second-cabin passengers, as a body, to ours ; and 
audibly mutters that the first-class accommodation 



54 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

is not worth — I need not repeat what. Altogether, 
he is such a baleful, malignant, wet-blanket son of a 
gun, that I feel myself fast growing mutinous ; and 
his sinister prophecies go on multiplying so rapidly, 
that I christen him Jonah, and am very much in- 
clined to sign a round-robin, or to head a deputation 
of the passengers to Captain StefFens, praying that 
he may be cast into the sea. But where is the fish 
that would consent to keep such a terrible old bore 
for three days and nights in its belly ? 

As, when in a summer afternoon's nap you have 
been drowsily annoyed, some half-hour durant, by a 
big blue-bottle, and are suddenly awakened by the 
sharp agony of a hornet's sting full in the calf of 
your favourite leg, so, suddenly does the passive an- 
noyance of Captain Smith's evil predictions cede to 
the active torture of Miss Wapps's persecution. 
Miss Wapps, English, travelling alone, and aged 
forty, has taken it into her fair head to entertain a 
violent dislike to me, and pursues me with quite a 
ferocity of antipathy. She is a lean and bony spin- 
ster, with a curiously blue-bronzed nose, and cheek- 
bones to match, and a remarkable mole on her chin 
with a solitary hair growing from it like One-Tree 
Hill at Greenwich. She has a profusion of little 
ringlets that twist and twine like the serpents of the 
Furies that had taken to drinking, and had been met- 
amorphosed, as a punishment, into corkscrews. To 
see her perambulating the decks after they have been 
newly swabbed, holding up her drapery, and display- 
ing a pair of baggy — well, I suppose there is no 
harm in the word — pantalettes, and with a great 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 55 

round flap hat surmounting all, she looks ludicrously- 
like an overgrown school -girl. She is one of those 
terrible specimens of humanity who have a precon- 
ceived persuasion — a woman who has made up her 
mind about everything — arts, sciences, laws, learn- 
ing, commerce, religion, Shakspeare, and the musical 
glasses — and nothing can shake, nothing convince, 
nothing mollify her. Her conclusions are ordinarily- 
unfavourable. She stayed a few hours at the Drei 
Kronen at Stettin, where I had the advantage of her 
society, and she made up her mind at a very early- 
stage of our acquaintance that I was an impostor, 
because I said I was going to St. Petersburg. 
" Many persons," she remarked, with intense acer- 
bity, " talk of going to Eussia, when they never go 
further than Gravesend. I am going to St. Peters- 
burg to recover my property devastated by the late 
unchristian war." As this seemed a double-barrelled 
insinuation, implying not only my having stated the 
thing which was not, but also the unlikdihood of 
my possessing any property to be devastated or re- 
covered, I began to feel sufficiently uncomfortable, 
and endeavoured to bring about a better state of 
feeling, by asking Miss Wapps if I might have the 
pleasure of helping her to some wine. She over- 
whelmed me at once with a carboy of vitriolic acid : 
she ne^Y took wine — never ! And though she said 
no more, it was very easy to gather from Miss 
Wapps's tone and looks that in her eyes the person 
most likely to rob the Bank of England, go over to 
the Pope of Rome, and assassinate the Emperor of 
the French, would be the man who did take wine 



56 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

to his dinner. She flatly contradicted me, too, as to 
the amount of the fare (which I had just paid) from 
Stettin to Cronstadt. She .had made up her mind 
that it was one hundred and fifty francs French 
money, and all the arguments in the world could not 
bring her to recognize the existence of such things 
as roubles or thalers. But where she was Samsoni- 
cally strong against me was on the question of my 
nationality. As I happen to be rather swart of hue, 
and a tolerable linguist, she took it into her head at 
once that I was a foreigner, and addressed me as 
" Mossoo." In vain did I try to convince her that I 
was born and bred in London, within the sound of 
Bow-bells. To make the matter worse — it being 
necessary for me, during one of the endless passport 
formalities, to answer to my name, which is not very 
English in sound — ^it went conclusively to make out 
a case against me in the mind of Miss Wapps. She 
called me Mossoo again, but vengefuUy in sarcastic 
accents ; and complained of the infamy of an hon- 
ourable English gentlewoman being beset by Jesuits 
and spies. 

On board. Miss Wapps does not abate one atom 
of her animosity. I have not the fatuity to believe 
that I am what is usually termed popular with the 
sex ; but as I am, I hope, inoffensive and a good 
listener, I have been able to retain some desirable 
female acquaintances ; but there is no conciliating 
Miss Wapps. She is enraged with me for not being 
sea-sick. She unmistakably gives me to understand 
that I am a puppy? because I wear the courier's bag 
slung by a strap over my shoulder; and when I 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 57 

meekly represent to her that it is very useful for car- 
rying lucifer-matches, a comb, change, Bradshaw, 
cigars, eau-de-Cologne,^ a brandy-flask, and such 
small matters, she gives utterance to a peculiar kind 
of feminine grunt, something between that of an 
asthmatic pig and an elderly Wesleyan at a moving 
part of the sermon, but which to me plainly means 
that she hates me, and that she does not believe a 
word I say. She wants to know what the world is 
coming to, when men can puff their filthy tobacco 
under the noses of ladies accustomed to the best 
society ? and when I plead that the deck is the place 
for smoking, and that all the other gentlemen pas- 
sengers are doing as I do, she retorts, " More shame 
for them I " She alludes to the pretty stewardess 
by the appellation of " hussey," at which I feel 
vastly moved to strangle her ; and she has an abom- 
inable air-cushion with a hole in it, which is always 
choking up hatchways, or tripping up one's legs, or 
tumbling over cabin-boys' heads like the Chinese 
cange. As a culmination of injury, she publicly 
accuses me at dinner of detaining the mustard de- 
signedly and of malice aforethought at my end of 
the table. I am covered with confusion, and endeav- 
our to excuse myself ; but she overpowers me with 
her voice, and Captain StefFens looks severely at 
me. I have an inward struggle after dinner, as to 
whether I shall give her a piece of my mind, and so 
shut her up for ever, or make her an offer of mar- 
riage ; but I take a middle course, and subside into 
the French language, which she cannot speak, and 
in which, therefore, she cannot contradict me. After 

3* 



68 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

this, she makes common cause against me with 
Captain Smith (why didn't she go down in the 
" Schon Jungfrau ? ") ; and. as they walk the deck 
together I don't think I am in error in concluding 
that she is continuing to denounce me as a Jesuit 
and a spy, and that the captain has imparted to her 
his opinion that I am " not worth a tam ! " 

We have another lady passenger in the chief 
cabin ; she is a French lady, and (she makes no dis- 
guise at all about the matter) an actress. She is 
going to Moscow for the coronation, when there are 
to be grand dramatic doings ; bat she is coming out 
thus early to stay with her mamma, also an actress, 
who has been fifteen years in St. Petersburg. " Ima- 
ginez vous,'" she says, " dans ce trou ! " She is very 
pretty, very coquettish, very good-natured, very 
witty, and comically ignorant of the commonest 
things. Captain Steffens loves her like a father 
already, I can see. Even the grim Captain Smith 
regards her with the affection of a Dutch uncle. 
She dresses every morning for the deck, and every 
afternoon for dinner, with as much care as though she 
were still on her beloved Boulevard de Gand. Her 
hair is always smooth, her eyes always bright, her little 
foot always bien chaussee^ her dress always in apple- 
pie order, her temper always lively, cheerful, amiable. 
She eats little wings of birds in a delightfully cat- 
like manner, and chirps, after a glass of champagne, 
in a manner ravishing to behold. She is all lithe 
movements, and silver laughter, and roguish sayings. 
Enjin: she is a Parisienne! What need I say 
more ? She has a dozen of the gentlemen passen- 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 59 

• 

gers at her feet as soon as she boards the " Preus- 
sischer Adler," but she bestows her arm for the 
voyage on Monsieur Alexandre, a fat Frenchman 
with a beard and a wide-awake hat ; who is, I sus- 
pect, a traveller for some champagne house at 
Rheims. He follows her about like a corpulent 
poodle ; he takes care of her baskets, shawls, and 
furs ; he toils up ladders with camp-stools for her ; 
he holds an umbrella over her to shield her from the 
sun ; he cuts the leaves of books for her ; he pro- 
duces for her benefit private stores of chocolate and 
bon-bans ; he sits next to her at dinner, and carves 
tit-bits for her; he pays for the champagne; he 
walks the deck with her by moonlight, shielding her 
from the midnight air with ample pelisses, and roll- 
ing his little eyes in his fat face. She is all smiles 
and amiability to him (as, indeed, to every one else) ; 
she allows him to sit at her feet ; she gives him to 
snuff from her vinaigrette ; she pats his broad back 
and calls him " Mon bon gros ; " she is as familiar 
with him as if she had known him a quarter of a 
century ; she orders him about like a dog or a black 
man; but is never cross, never pettish. She will 
probably give him the tips of her little fingers to kiss 
when she leaves him at Cronstadt ; and, when some 
day perhaps she meets him by chance on the Nev- 
skoi, she won't know him from Adam. 

'Twas ever thus from childhood's hour — I mean, 
this is always my fate. Somebody else gets the 
pleasant travelling companions ; I get the Miss 
Wappses. I never fall in love with a pretty girl, 
but I find she has a sweetheart already, or has been 



60 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

engaged for ten years to her cousin Charles in India, 
who is coming home by the next ship to marry her. 
Am I not as good as a wine-merchant's bagman ? 
Never mind ; let me console myself with the Rus- 
sian. 

The Russian is a gentleman whose two years' 
term of travel has expired, and who, not being able 
to obtain an extension of his leave of absence, and 
not very desirous of having his estates sequestered, 
which would be the penalty of disobedience, is re- 
turning, distressingly against his own inclination, to 
Russia, is an individual who looks young enough to 
be two or three and twenty, and old enough to be 
two or three and forty. How are you to tell in a 
gentleman whose hair, without a speck of gray, is 
always faultlessly brushed, oiled, perfumed, and 
arranged ; whose moustache is lustrous, firm, and 
black; whose teeth are sound and white; whose 
face is perfectly smooth, and clear, and clean 
shaven ; who is always perfectly easy, graceful, 
and self-possessed ? The Russian speaks English 
and French — ^the first language as you and I, my 
dear Bob, speak it ; the second as our friend. 
Monsieur Adolphe, from Paris, would speak his 
native tongue ; by which I mean that the Russian 
speaks English like an Englishman, and French like 
a Frenchman, without hesitation, accent, or foreign 
idiom. He is versed in the literature of both coun- 
tries, and talks of Sam Weller and Jerome Paturot 
with equal facility. I am, perhaps, not so well qual- 
ified to judge of his proficiency in Italian ; but he 
seems to speak that tongue with at least the same 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 61 

degree of fluency as he converses in German, of 
which, according to Captain StefFens, he is a master. 
He laughs when I talk about the special and as- 
tounding gift that his countrymen seem to possess 
for the acquisition of languages. " Gift, my dear 
fellow," he says, " it is nothing of the kind. I cer- 
tainly picked up Italian in six months, during a 
residence in the country ; but I could speak French, 
English, and German long before I could speak 
Russian. Nous autres gentilhommes Russes, we 
have English nurses ; we have French and Swiss 
governesses ; we have German professors at college. 
As children and as adults we often pass days and 
weeks without hearing a word of Russian ; and the 
language with which we have the slightest acquaint- 
ance is our own." The Russian and I soon grow 
to be great (travelling) friends. He talks, and seems 
to be well informed, on every body and every thing, 
and speaks about governments and dynasties in pre- 
cisely the same tone of easy persiflage in which he 
discusses the Italian opera and the ballet. He tells 
me a great deal about the Greek church ; but it is 
easy to see that matters ecclesiastical don't trouble 
" nous autres gentilhommes Russes " much. He has 
been in the army, like the vast majority of his order, 
and is learned in horses, dogs, and general sports- 
manship ; a branch of knowledge that clashes 
strangely with his grassailleing Parisian accent. 
He proposes ecarte in an interval of chat ; but find- 
ing that I am but a poor cardplayer, he shows me a 
few tricks on the cards sufiicient to set a moderately 
ambitious wizard up in business on the spot, and 



62 A JOUKNEY DUE NORTH. 

contentedly relinquishes the pack for the pianoforte, 
on which he executes such brilliant voluntaries, that 
I can see the hard-favoured visage of Miss Wapps 
gazing down at us through the saloon skylight in 
discontented admiration — that decisive lady marvel- 
ling doubtless how such an accomplished Russian 
can condescend to waste his time and talents on 
such a trumpery mortal as I am. He shows me an 
album bound in green velvet, and with his cipher 
and coronet embroidered in rubies thereupon, and 
filled with drawings of his own execution. He 
rolls paper cigarettes with the dexterity of a Cas- 
tilian caballero ; and he has the most varied and 
exact statistical knowledge on all sorts of topics, 
political, social, agricultural, and literary, of any 
man I ever met with. And this is, believe me, as 
ordinary and every-day-to-be-found specimen of the 
Russian gentlemen as the unlettered, unlicked, un- 
couth, untravelled John Smith one meets at a Bou- 
logne boarding-house is of an English esquire. My 
friend, the Russian, has his little peculiarities ; with- 
out being in the slightest degree grave or senten- 
tious that facile mouth of his is never curved into a 
genuine smile ; those dark-gray eyes of his never 
look you in the face ; he seems never tired of drink- 
ing champagne, and never in the least flushed 
thereby ; and finally and above all, I never hear him 
express an opinion that any human thing is right or 
wrong. If he have an opinion on any subject, and 
he converses on almost all topics, it is not on board 
the " Preussischer Adler," or to me, that he will 
impart it. With his handsome face and graceful 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 63 

carriage, and varied parts, this is the sort of man 
whom nine women out of ten would fall desperately 
in love with at first sight ; yet he drops a witty 
anecdote or so about the sex, that makes me start 
and say. Heaven help the woman who ever falls in 
love with him ! 

It may have struck the reader, that beyond allud- 
ing to the bare fact of being on the Baltic, and in a 
fair way for Cronstadt, I have said little or nothing 
as yet concerning our actual voyage. In the first 
place, there is but little marine intelligence to be 
chronicled; for from Saturday at noon, when we 
started, to this present Monday evening, we have 
had uninterrupted fair weather and smooth water ; 
and are gliding along as on a lake. And, in the 
second place, I generally avoid the subject of the 
sea as much as I can. I hate it. I have a. dread 
for it, as Mrs. Hemans had. To me it is simply a 
Monster, cruel, capricious, remorseless, rapacious, 
insatiable, deceitful ; sullenly unwilling to disgorge 
its treasures ; mockingly refusing to give up its dead. 
But it must, and Shall, some day : the Sea. If any 
thing could reconcile me, however, to that baseless 
highway, it would be the days and nights we h£tve 
had since Saturday. It is never dark, and the moon, 
beautiful as she is, is almost an intruder, so long 
does the sun lord it over the heavens, so short are 
his slumbers, (it is not far from the time and place 
where he rises at midnight,*) so gloriously strong 
and fresh does he come up to his work again in the 

* At Tornea, in Sweden, on the twenty-first of June. 



64 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

morning. And the white ships that glide on the 
tranquil sea, far far away towards the immensity of 
the horizon, are as auguries of peace and hope to 
me ; and the very smoke from the boat's funnel that 
was black and choky at Stettin, is now, in the un- 
dying sun, all gorgeous in purple and orange as it 
rolls forth in clouds that wander rudderless through 
the empty sky, till the sea-birds meet them, and 
break them into fragments with their sharp-sected 
wings. 

There is a very merry party forward, in the second 
cabin. Among them is a humorous character from 
the south of France, who is proceeding to Kussia to 
superintend a sugar manufactory belonging to some 
Russfan seigneur. He has been established by com- 
mon consent chief wag and joke-master in ordinary 
to the Prussian Eagle. I hear shouts of laughter 
from where he holds his merry court long after I am 
snug in my berth ; and the steward retails his latest 
witticisms to us at dinner, hot and hot, between 
the courses. He lives at free quarters, for his jests' 
sakes, in the way of wines, spirits, and cigars ; and 
I don't think the steward can have the heart to take 
any money of him for fees or extras at the voyage's 
end. " QuHl est gai!^^ says the French actress 
admiringly. As a wag he must, of course, have a 
butt : and he has fixed on a little, snuffy, old French- 
woman, with a red cotton pocket-handkerchief tied 
round her head, who, with a large basket, a larger 
umbrella, and no other perceptible luggage, started 
up suddenly at Stettin. She has got a passport 
with Count Orlofl's own signature appended to it, 



I AM ABOARD THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE. 65 

and does not seem to mind the Russians a bit. 
Who can she be ? The Czar's fosterm other, per- 
haps. The funny Frenchman (who never saw her 
before in his life) now calls her ''• maman^^^ now 
assumes to be madly in love with her, to the infinite 
merriment of the other passengers ; but she repulses 
his advances with the utmost good humour, and 
evidently considers him to be a wag of the first 
water. Many of this good fellow's jokes are of a 
slightly practical nature, and would, in phlegmatic 
English society, probably lead to his being kicked 
by somebody; but to me they are all amply re- 
deemed by his imperturbable good humour, and his 
frank, hearty laughter. Besides, he won my heart 
in the very commencement by making a face behind 
Miss Wapps's back so supernaturally comic, so irre- 
sistibly ludicrous, that Grimaldi, had he known him, 
would have been jaundiced with envy. The great 
Captain Stefiens favours this jovial blade, and 
unbends to him, they say, more than he has ever 
been known to do to mortal second-cabin passenger. 
The il] -boding Captain Smith came to my berth 
last night, with a rattlesnake-like smile, to tell me we 
were off" Hango Head, (a fit place for such a raven 
to herald,) and to refresh my memory about the ice ; 
and here, sure enough, this Tuesday morning, we 
are in the very thick of floating masses of the frozen 
sea ! Green, transparent, and assuming every kind 
of weird and fantastic shapes, they hem the " Preus- 
sischer Adler " round, cracking and groaning " like 
noises in a swound," as the Ancient Mariner heard 
them. Warm and balmy as the May air was 



66 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ternight, it is now piercing cold ; and I walk the 
deck a very moving bale of furs, which the courte- 
ous Russian has insisted on lending me. We are 
obliged to move with extreme caution and slowness, 
stopping altogether from time to time ; but the ice 
gradually lessens, gradually disappears ; the shores 
of the Gulf keep gradually becoming more distinct ; 
and, on the Russian side, I can see white houses 
and the posts of the telegraph. 

About noon on Tuesday, the twentieth of May, 
turning at the gangway to walk towards the steam- 
er's head, I see a sight that does my eyes good. I 
have the advantage of being extremely short-sighted, 
and a view does not grow, but starts upon me. 
And now, all fresh and blue, and white, and spark- 
ling and dancing in the sunlight, I see a scene that 
Mr. Stanfield might paint — a grove of masts, 
domes and steeples, and factory chimneys ; a myriad 
of trim yachts and smaller craft, and, dotting the 
bright blue water like the Seven Castles of the 
Devil, with tier above tier of embrasures bristling 
with cannon, the granite forts of the impregnable 
Cronstadt. There is a big guard-ship behind us, 
and forts and guns on every side, and I feel that I 
am in for it. 

" Lads, sharpen your cutlasses," was the signal of 
the Admiral who didn't breakfast in Cronstadt and 
dine in St. Petersburg. Let me put a fresh nib to 
my goosequill, and see what I can do, in my hum- 
ble way, to make some little impression on those 
granite walls. 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 67 

ni. 

I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 

We had no sooner cast anchor in the harbour of 
Cronstadt, (it needed something to divert my atten- 
tion, for I had been staring at the forts and their 
embrasures, especially at one circular one shelving 
from the top, like a Stilton cheese in tolerably 
advanced cut, till the whole sky swarmed before 
me, a vast plain of black dots,) than we were 
invaded by the Russians. If the naval forces of his 
imperial majesty Alexander the Second display half 
as much alacrity in boarding the enemies' ships in 
the next naval engagement as did this agile board- 
ing-party of policemen and custom-house officers, no 
British captain need trouble himself to nail his 
colours to the mast. The best thing he can do is to 
strike them at once, or put them in his pocket, and 
so save time and bloodshed. On they came like 
cats, a most piratical-looking crew to be sure. There 
were big men with red moustaches, yellow mous- 
taches, drab moustaches, grey moustaches, fawn- 
coloured moustaches, and white moustaches. Some 
had thrown themselves into whiskers with all the 
energy of their nature, and had produced some 
startling effects in that line. A pair of a light-bufF 
colour, poudre with coal-dust (he had probably just 
concluded an official visit to some neighbouring 
engine-room,) were much admired. There were 



68 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

men with faces so sun-baked, that their eyes looked 
considerably lighter than their faces ; there were 
others with visages so white and pasty that their 
little, black, Chinese eyes looked like currants in a 
suet-dumpling. And it was now, for the first time, 
that, with great interest and curiosity, I saw the 
famous Russian military greatcoat — that hideous 
capote of some coarse frieze of a convict-colour, half- 
grey, half-drab (the colour of inferior oatmeal, to be 
particular,) which is destined, I suppose, to occupy 
as large a place in history as the redingote guise of 
the first Napoleon. These greatcoats — buttoned 
straight down from the throat to the waist and from 
thence falling down to the heels in uncouth folds 
and gathered in behind with a buckle and strap of 
the same cloth — had red collars and cuffs, the former 
marked with letters in a fantastic alphabet, that 
looked as a Greek Lexicon might look after a sup- 
per of raw pork chops. The letters wfere not Greek, 
not Arabic, not Roman, and yet they had some of 
the characteristics of each abecedaire. These gentry 
were police officers ; most of them wore a round flat 
cap with a red band ; and if you desire further details, 
go to the next toyshop and purchase a Noah's ark, 
and among the male members (say Shem : Ham is 
too bright-looking) you will find the very counter- 
part of these Russian polizeis. One little creature, 
apparently about sixty years of age, almost a dwarf, 
almost hump-backed, and with a face so perforated 
with pockmarks that, had you permission to empty 
his skull of its contents, you might have used 
him for a cullender and strained maccaroni through 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 69 

him — ^but with a very big sword and a fierce pair 
of moustaches ; this small Muscovite I named 
Japhet on the spot. He walked and fell (over my 
portmanteau, I am sorry to say) all in one piece ; 
and, when he saluted his officer (which every one 
of the privates seemed to do twice in every three 
minutes,) and which salute consists in a doffing 
of the cap and a very low bow, he seemed to have 
a hinge in his spine, but nowhere else. There were 
men in authority amongst these policemen, mostly 
athletic, big-whiskered fellows, who looked as if they 
did the knocking-down part of the police business 
(shall I ever know better what these large-whiskered 
men do, I wonder?) These wore helmets with 
spikes on the top and the Double Eagle, in the 
brightest tin, in front. They must have been mighty 
warriors too, some of them ; for many were decor- 
ated with medals and crosses, not of any very ex- 
pensive materials, and suspended to ribbons of 
equivocal hue, owing to the dirt. On the broad 
breast of one brave I counted nine medals and 
crosses (I counted them twice, carefully, to be quite 
certain) strung all of a row on a straight piece of 
wire; and, with their tawdry scraps of ribbons, 
looking exceedingly like the particolored rags you 
see on a dyer's pole. Some had great stripes or 
galons of coppery-looking lace on their sleeves ; 
and there was one officer who not only wore a 
helmet, but a green surtout laced with silver, the 
ornaments of which were inlaid with black dirt 
and grease in a novel and tasteful manner. The 
custom-house officers wore unpretending uniforms 



70 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

of shabby green, and copper buttons : and the ma- 
jority of the subordinates, both polizeis and doua- 
niers, had foul Belcher handkerchiefs twisted round 
their necks. There were two other trifling circum- 
stances peculiar to these braves, which, in my qual- 
ity of an observer, I may be allowed to mention. 
Number one is, that nearly all these men had no 
lobes to their ears.* Number two is, that from care- 
ful and minute peeping up their sleeves and down 
their collars, I am in a position to declare my be- 
lief that there was not one single shirt among the 
whole company. About the officer I cannot be so 
certain. I did not venture to approach near enough 
to him; but I had four hours' opportunity to ex- 
amine the privates, (as you will shortly hear,) and 
what I have stated is the fact. A Hottentot private 
gentleman is not ordinarily considered to be a model 
of cleanliness. It is difficult in England to find 
dirtier subjects for inspection than the tramps in 
a low lodging-house; but for dirt surpassing ten 
thousand times anything I have ever yet seen, 
commend me to our boarding-party. They were, 
assuredly, the filthiest set of ragamuffins that ever, 
kept step since Lieutenant- Colonel FalstafF's regi- 
ment was disbanded. 

I am thus particular on a not very inviting subject, 
because the remarkable contrast between the hideous 
dirt of the soldiery on ordinary, and their scrupulous 
cleanliness on extraordinary occasions, is one of 

* This is a physical peculiarity I have observed in scores of 
Russians — some of them in the highest classes of society. 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 71 

the things that must strike the attention (and at 
least two of the senses) of every traveller in Russia. 
On parade, at a review, whenever he is to be in- 
spected, a Russian soldier (and under that generic 
name I may fairly include policemen and douaniers 
in a country where even the postmen are military) 
is literally — outwardly at least — as clean as a new 
pin. But it would seem that it is only under the 
eye of his emperor or his general that the Musco- 
vite warrior is expected to be clean; for, on every 
occasion but those I have named, he is the dirtiest, 
worst-smelling mortal to be found anywhere be- 
tween Beachy Head and the Bay of Fundy. I am 
fearful, too, lest I should be thought exaggerating 
on the topic of shirts ; but it is a fact that the Rus- 
sians, as a people, do not yet understand the proper 
use of a linen or cotton under-garment. The mou- 
jiks, who wear shirts, are apparently in the same 
state of doubt as to how to wear them, as the Scot- 
tish Highlanders were on the subject of pantaloons 
after the sumptuary laws of seventeen hundred and 
forty-six. Poor Alister Macalister carried the 
breeches which the ruthless Sassenach government 
had forced on him, on the top of his walking-pole. 
Ivan Ivanovitch wears his shirt, when he is lucky 
enough to possess one, outside his trousers, after 
the manner of a surplice. The soldier thinks that 
the uniform greatcoat covers a multitude of sins, 
and wears no shirt at all. According to the accu- 
rate Baron de Haxthausen, the kit of every Russian 
soldier ought to contain three shirts ; but theory is 
one thing, and practice another ; and I can state, of 



72 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

my own personal experience, that I have played 
many games of billiards with Russian officers even, 
(you can't well avoid seeing up to your opponent's 
elbow at some stages of the game,) and that if 
they possessed shirts, they either kept them laid 
up in lavender at home, or wore them without 
sleeves. 

The unsavoury boarders who had thus made the 
Preussischer Adler their prize, very speedily let us 
know that we were in a country where a man may 
not, by any means, do what he likes with his own. 
They guarded the gangway, they pervaded the 
wheel, and not only spoke to the man thereat, but 
rendered his further presence there quite unneces- 
sary. They placed the funnel under strict surveil- 
lance, and they took possession of the whole of the 
baggage at one fell swoop, attaching to each pack- 
age curious little leaden seals stuck on bits of 
string, and inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphs 
strongly resembling the Rabbinical cachets which 
the Hebrew butchers in Whitechapel Market append 
to their joints of meat. Then a tall douanier began 
wandering among the maze of chests, portmanteaus, 
and carpet-bags ; marking here and there a package 
in abstruse and abstracted manner with a piece of 
chalk, as though he were working out mathematical 
problems. We were not allowed to carry the 
smallest modicum of luggage on our persons ; 
and — as I had been incautious enough, just before 
our arrival in harbour, to detach my unlucky 
courier's bag from my side, and to hold it in my 
hand, — I was soon unpleasantly reminded of the 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. * 73 

stringency of the customs' regulations of the port 
of Cronstadt. The tail douanier pounced upon the 
harmless leather pouch quite gleefully, and instanta- 
neously declaring (in chalk) on the virgin leather 
that the angle A. G. was equal to the angle G. B., 
added it to the heap of luggage which then encum- 
bered the deck. There it lay, with the little French 
actress's swan-down boa, and I am happy to state, 
my old enemy — Miss Wapps's perforated air-cush- 
ion. But Miss Wapps made the steward the 
wretchedest man in Russia for about five minutes ; 
so fiercely did she rate him on the sequestration of 
that chattel of hers. 

There was a dead pause, a rather uncomfortable 
status quo about this time, everybody seemed to be 
waiting for the performances to begin, and the 
boarding-party looked, in their stiff, awkward immo- 
bility, like a band of "supers" waiting the arrival 
of the tyrant. Only the little creature who was 
nearly a hunchback was active ; for the mathemati- 
cal genius had gone to sleep, or was pretending to 
sleep on a sea-chest, with his head resting in his 
chalky hands. It seemed to be the province of this 
diminutive but lynx-eyed functionary to guard 
against the possibility of any contraband merchan- 
dise oozing out of the baggage after it had been 
sealed ; and he went peering, and poking, and turn- 
ing up bags and boxes with his grimy paws, sniffing 
sagaciously meanwhile, as if he could discover pro- 
hibited books and forged bank notes by scent. 
Captain StefFens had mysteriously disappeared ; and 
the official with the silver-lace, inlaid with dirt, was 



74 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

nowhere to be found. About this time, also, it oc- 
curred to the crew — ^taking advantage of this forty- 
bars' rest — ^to send a deputation aft, consisting of a 
hairy mariner in a fur-cap, ear-rings, a piebald cow- 
skin waistcoat, a green shirt, worsted net tights and 
hessians, to solicit trink-geld, or drink-money. On 
the deputation ushering itself into my presence, with 
the view above stated, I informed it politely, and in 
the best German I could muster, that I had already 
paid an extravagant price for my passage, and that 
I would see the deputation fried before I gave it a 
groschen ; and soon after this, the stewards, probably 
infected by some epidemic of extortion hovering in 
the atmosphere of Russia, began to make out fabu- 
lous bills against the passengers for bottles of cham- 
pagne they had never dreamt of, and cups of coffee 
they had never consumed. And, as none of us had 
any Russian money, and every one was anxious to 
get rid of his Prussian thalers and silbergroschen, 
the deck was soon converted into an animated 
money-market, in which some of us lost our temper, 
and all of us about twenty per cent, on the money 
we changed. 

There was a gentleman on board, of the Hebrew 
persuasion — a very different gentleman however from 
my genial friend from Posen, or from the merchant in 
cat-skins at Stettin — who had brought with him — of 
of all merchandise in the world ! — a consignment of 
three hundred canary-birds. These little songsters 
had been built up into quite a castle of cages, open 
at all four sides ; the hatches of the hold had been 
left open during the voyage ; and it was very pretty 



I LAND .AT CRONSTADT. 75 

and pastoral to hear them executing their silvery 
roulades in the beautiful May evening, and to see 
the Hebrew gentleman (he wore a white hat, a yel- 
low waistcoat, a drab coat, light-gray trousers and 
buff slippers, and, with his somewhat jaundiced com- 
plexion, looked not unlike a canary-bird himself,) go 
down the ladder into the hold, to feed his choristers 
and converse with them in a cheerful and friendly 
manner. But he was in a pitiable state of tribula- 
tion ; firstly, because he had learnt that the customs' 
duties on singing birds in Russia were enormous ; 
and, secondly, because he had been told that Jews 
were not suffered to enter St. Petersburg.* He 
turned his coat-collar up, and pulled his hat over his 
eyes with a desperate effort to make himself look 
like a Christian ; but he only succeeded in travesty- 
ing, not in disguising, himself; for, whereas, he had 
looked a frank, open Jew, say, like Judas Macca- 
bsBUS ; he, now, with his cowering and furtive mien, 
looked unspeakably like Judas Iscariot. He was 
sorely annoyed, too, at the proceedings of one of the 
policemen, who, having probably never seen a cana- 
ry bird before, and imagining it to be a species of 
wild beast of a diminutive size, was performing the 

* I am not aware of the existence of any Oukase positively 
forbidding Jews to settle at St. Petersburg : but it is certain that 
there are no Jews in the Russian •capital. In other parts of the 
empire a distinction is made between the Karaim Jews, who abide 
by the law of the Old Testament, and the Rabbinical Jews, who 
hold by the Talmud. The former are tolerated and protected ; 
but the latter are treated with great rigour, and are not permitted 
to settle in the towns. 



76 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

feat of stirring it up with a long pole, by means of a 
tobacco pipe, poked between the wires of one of the 
cages, and was apparently much surprised that the 
little canary declined singing under that treatment. 
But, courage, my Hebrew friend ! you have brought 
your birds to a fine market, even if you have to pay 
fifty per cent, ad valorem duty on them. For, be it 
known, a canary sells for twenty-five silver roubles 
in Kussia — for nearly four pounds ! and, as for a 
parrot, I have heard of one, and two hundred roubles 
being given for one, that could speak French. 

The wag from the South of France had not been 
idle all this time. "Who but he counterfeited (while 
he was not looking) the usage and bearing of the 
little semi-humpbacked policeman, and threw us 
into convulsions of laughter ? Who but he pre- 
tended to be dreadfully frightened at the officer in 
the dirt-inlaid lace, running away from him, after 
the manner of Mr. Flexmore the clown, when he is 
told that the policeman is coming ? Who but he 
addressed the very tallest douanier in the exact 
voice, and with the exact gesture of the immortal 
Punch (at which we went into fits, of course, and 
even the adamantine Miss Wapps condescended to 
smile), pouring forth a flood of gibberish, which he 
declared to be Russian. The douanier looked very 
ferocious, and I thought the wag would have been 
knouted and sent to Sit)eria; but he got over it 
somehow, and gave the customs' magnate a cigar, 
which that brave proceeded, with great gravity and 
deliberation, to chew, and they were soon the best 
friends in the world. 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 77 

I was getting very tired of assuring myself of the 
shirtlessness of the boarders, whom I had now been 
inspecting for nearly three quarters of an hour, when 
Captain StefFens reappeared, this time without the 
telescope, but with the thirty passports as usual 
fluttering in the breeze, and a pile of other papers 
besides. He had mounted his epaulettes again, had 
Captain StefFens, and a stiffer shirt-collar than ever ; 
and on his breast nearest his heart there shone a 
gold enamelled cross and a particoloured riband, 
proclaiming to us awe-stricken passengers and to 
the world in general, that Captain Steffens was a 
knight of one of the thousand and one Russian 
orders. It might have been a Prussian order, you 
may urge. No, no, my eyes were too sharp for that. 
Young as I was to Russia, I could tell already a 
hawk from a handsaw, and the august split crow of 
the autocrat from the jay-like black eaglet of Prus- 
sia. I think Captain StefFens's decoration was the 
fifteenth class of St. Michael the Moujik. The 
chief mate was also in full fig; and, though he 
could boast no decoration, he had a tremendous pin 
in his shirt, with a crimson bulb a-top like a brandy- 
ball. And Captain Steffens and his mate were both 
arrayed in this astounding costume evidently to do 
honour to and receive with respect two helmeted 
beings, highly laced, profusely decorated, and posi- 
tively clean, who now boarded the steamer from a 
man-o'-war's gig alongside, and were with many 
bows ushered into the saloon. 

Whether he had dropped cherublike from aloft, 
where he had been looking out for our lives, or risen 



78 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

like Venus from the salt-sea spray, or come with the 
two helmets in the gig — though I could almost 
make affidavit that he was not in it when it rowed 
alongside, — or boarded the Prussian Eagle in his 
own private wherry, or risen from the hold where he 
had lain concealed during the voyage, or been then 
and there incarnated from the atmospheric atoms ; 
whether he came as a spirit but so would not de- 
part, I am utterly incapable of judging ; but this is 
certain, that at the cabin-door there suddenly ap- 
peared Mr. Edward Wright, comedian. I say Mr. 
Wright advisedly ; because, although the apparition 
turned out to be a Russian to the back-bone, thigh- 
bone, and hip-bone, and though his name was very 
probably Somethingovitch or Off, he had Mr. 
Wright's voice, and Mr. Wright's face, together 
with the teeth, eye-glass, white ducks, and little pa- 
tent tipped boots of that favourite actor. And he 
was not only Mr. Wright, but he was Mr. Wright 
in the character of Paul Pry — minus the costume, 
certainly, but with the eye-glass and the umbrella to 
the life. I am not certain whether he wore a white 
hat, but I know that he carried a little locked port- 
folio under one arm, that his eyes without the slight- 
est suspicion of a squint were everywhere at once ; 
that he grinned Mr. Wright as Paul Pry's grin in- 
cessantly ; that he was always hoping he didn't in- 
trude ; and that he did intrude most confoundedly. 

" Police ? " I asked the Russian in a whisper. 

My accomplished friend elevated and then de- 
pressed his eyebrows in token of acquiescence, and 
added « Orloff I » 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 79 

" But Count OrlofF is in Paris," I ventured to 
remark. 

" I say Orloff when I speak of ces gen Id^^ an- 
swered the Russian. " He is of the secret police — 
Section des Etrangers — counsellor of a college, if 
you know what that is ? Gives capital dinners." 

" Do you know him ? " 

" I know him ! " repeated the Russian ; and, for 
the first time during our acquaintance, I saw the ex- 
pression of something like emotion in his face, and 
this expressed contemptuous indignation. " My dear 
sir, we do not know ces gen Id, nous autres.^^ 

Mr. Wright was at home immediately. He shook 
hands with Captain Steffens as if he would have 
his hand off, clapped the first mate on the shoulder ; 
who, for his part, I grieve to say, looked as if he 
would like to knock his head off; and addressed a 
few words in perfect English to the nearest passen- 
gers. Then he took the captain's arm quite amica- 
bly, and took the locked portfolio and the gleaming 
teeth (they were not Mr. Carker's teeth, but Mr. 
Wright's) and himself into the saloon. I was so 
fascinated at the sight of this smiling banshee, that 
I should have followed him into the cabin ; but the 
wary polizeis, who had already turned everybody 
out of the saloon in the most summary, and not 
the most courteous manner, now formed a cordon 
across the entrance, and left us outside the para- 
dise of the Prussian Eagle, like peris rather than 
passengers. 

Captain Steffens, Mr. Wright, the two superior 
helmets, the thirty passports and the additional doc- 



80 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

nments — which I conjecture to have been our lives 
and adventures from the earliest period to the pres- 
ent time, compiled by the Russian consul at Stettin, 
and the secretary of legation at Berlin, with notes 
by Captain Steffens, and a glossary by Mr. Wright 
— were closeted in the saloon from a quarter to one 
to a quarter to four, p. m., by which time (as the 
" Preussischer Adler " had fulfilled her contract in 
bringing us to Cronstadt, and would give us neither 
bite nor sup more) I was sick with hunger and 
kinder streaked with rage. What they did in the 
saloon during this intolerable delay, whether they 
painted miniatures of us through some concealed 
spyhole, or played upon the piano, or witnessed a 
private performance of Bombastes Furioso by Mr. 
Wright, or went to sleep, no man could tell. The 
wag from the South of France, who, notwithstand- 
ing the rigid surveillance, had managed to creep 
round to the wheel, came back with a report that 
the conclave were drinking champagne and smoking 
cigars. The story was not unlikely ; but how was 
such a;n incorrigible joker to be believed? For three 
hours, then, there was nothing to be done but to 
satisfy myself that the polizeis were really shirtless, 
and to struggle with an insane desire to fly upon 
my portmanteau and open it, precisely because it 
was sealed up. The other passengers were moody, 
and my Russian friend was not nearly so fond of 
me as he was at sea. For, you must understand, 
my passport was good to Cronstadt ; but once ar- 
rived there, there was another process of whitewash- 
ing to be gone through ; and, to be intimate with a 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 81 

man whose papers might not be in rule, might com- 
promise even nous autres. 

The port of Cronstadt was very thronged and live- 
ly, and I feasted my eyes upon some huge English 
steamers from Hull and other northern English ports. 
It did me good to see the Union Jack ; but where 
were the gunboats, Mr. Bull ? Ah ! where were the 
gunboats ? Failing these, there were plenty of Rus- 
sian gunboats — ^black, saucy, trim, diabolical, little 
crafts enough, which were steaming about as if in 
search of ^me stray infernal machine that might 
have been overlooked since the war-time. Far away 
through the grove of masts, I could descry the mon- 
archs of the forest, the huge, half-masted hulks of 
the Russian line-of-battle ships. The stars and 
stripes of the great American republic were very 
much to the fore this Tuesday morning ; and, as I 
found afterwards, the American element was what 
Americans would term almighty strong in Russia. 
There was nothing to be seen of Cronstadt, the 
town, but the spires of some churches, some thun- 
dering barracks, the dome of the museum, and forts, 
forts, forts. But Cronstadt the port was very gay 
with dancing skiffs, and swift men-o'-war boats with 
their white-clad crews, and little coteries of coquet- 
tish yachts. The sky was so bright, the water so 
blue, the flags so varied, the yachts so rakish and 
snowy-sailed, that I could have fancied myself for a 
moment in Kingstown harbour, on my way to Dub- 
lin, instead of St. Petersburg, but for the forts, forts, 
forts. 

While I was viewing these things, and cursing 

4* •" 



82 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

Mr. Wright, (was it for this that he won our hearts 
at the Adelphi for so many years, inveigling ns out 
of so many half-price shillings, and insidiously con- 
cealing the fact of his connection with Count OrlofF 
-—now Prince Dolgorouki's secret police ?) while I 
was smoking very nearly the last cigar that I was to 
smoke in the open air so near St. Petersburg, there 
had glided alongside and nestled under the shadow 
of our big paddle-boxes a tiny war-steamer, or pyro- 
scaphe, with a St. Andrew or blue X cross on a 
white flag at her stern, and another little flag at her 
fore, compounded of different crosses and colors, and 
looking curiously like a Union Jack, though it wasn't 
one by any means. Nigra fuit sed formosa ; jet 
black was her hull, but she was comely-beautiful, a 
long lithe lizard carved in ebony, with an ivory 
streak on her back, (that was her deck,) and gliding 
almost noiselessly over the water. She looked not 
so much like a steamer as like the toy model of one 
seen through a powerful opera-glass ; and her wheel 
and compass, and spider-web rigging, and shining 
brass bolts, and bees'-waxed blocks, would have looked 
far more in place in the toyman's window in Fleet 
Street, London, than in this grim Cronstadt. She 
had her little murder-popguns though — tapering little 
brass playthings, such as you may see by dozens in 
a basket, marked eightpence each, in the same toy- 
shop window. This was a Russian-built boat, with 
Russian engines, engineers, and crew, and she seemed 
to say to me mockingly : " Ah ! we have no war- 
steamers, haven't we ? we are dependent upon Eng- 
land for our machinery, are we ? Wait a bit ! '' 



I LAND AT CKONSTADT. 83 

She was, in truth, as crack a piece of naval goods 
as I — not being a judge — could wish to see. She 
had a full crew of fine hardy fellows, spotlessly 
clean, and attired from head to foot in white duck. 
They were strapping, tawny, moustachioed men ; 
mostly, I was told, Fins. Your true Russian is no 
sailor ; though you may teach him to row, reef, and 
steer, as you may teach him to dance on the tight- 
rope. On the paddle-bridge there was an arm-chair, 
covered with crimson velvet, and in it, with his feet 
on a footstool, covered with the same material, sat 
the commander of the steamer. He was puffing a 
paper cigar ; he was moustachioed and whiskered 
like a life-guardsman ; he was epauletted and be- 
laced ; he was crossed and medalled for his services 
at the siege of Belleisle, doubtless ; he had spotless 
white trousers tightly strapped over his patent-leather 
boots ; but he had not a pair of spurs, though I 
looked for them attentively; and those who state 
that such ornaments exist on the heels of Russian 
naval officers are calumniators. Instead of a sword, 
he wore a dirk at his side, with a gold and ivory hilt, 
very tasteful and shipshape ; and, at the stern of the 
vessel there stood, motionless and rigid, a long man, 
with a drooping moustache like an artist's Sweet- 
ener, with a thoroughly Tartar face, and clad in the 
eternal coarse gray sack, who, they said, was a mid- 
shipman. He had a huge hour-glass before him, 
and two smaller quarter-hour glasses, which he 
turned with grave composure when the sand had 
run out. 

On the deck of an adjacent lighter I could see, 



84 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

for the first time, the genuine Russian national cos- 
tume, on a score of stalwart, bearded men, clad in 
an almost brimless felt hat, (not unlike that patron- 
ized by the Connaught bog-trotters,) a sheepskin 
coat, with the skinny side out and the woolly side 
in, (Mr. Brian O' Lynn's favourite wear, and which 
he declared to be mighty convaniant,) baggy breeches, 
apparently of bedticking, and long, clumsy, thick- 
soled boots of leather, innocent of blacking, and worn 
outside the trousers. These poor devils had been 
lading a dutch galliot, and it being dinner-hour, I 
suppose had knocked off work, and were lying dead 
asleep in all sorts of wonderful positions. Prone to 
the deck on the stomach, with the hands and legs 
stretched out like so many turtle, seemed to be the 
favourite posture for repose. But one gentleman, 
lying on his back, presented himself to my view in 
a most marvellous state of foreshortening — Cleaving 
nothing visible to me but the soles of his boots, the 
convexity of his stomach, and the tip of his nose. 
By and by their time for turning to again came ; 
and, when I saw the mate or foreman — or whatever 
else he was — of the gang, step among them with a 
long twisted ratan, like that of the. jailer in the 
Bridewell scene of the Harlot's Progress, and re- 
mind them that it was time to go to work, by the 
gentle means of striking, kicking, and all but jump- 
ing on them, I received my first lesson, that I was 
in a country where flesh and blood are cheaper — 
much cheaper — than gentle Thomas Hood ever wot- 
ted of. 

We had been in our floating prison with the 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 85 

chance of being drowned, three hours in addition to 
the seventy-three we had consumed in coming from 
Stettin, when the door of the saloon was flung wide 
open, and a polizei, seemingly seized with insanity, 
began frantically vociferating " Voyageur passport ! 
Passport voyageur ! " at the very top of his voice ; 
which cries he continued without intermission till he 
either ran down, like a clock, or was threatened by 
a discreet and scandalized corporal with the disci- 
plinary application of the stick if he did not desist. 
Poor fellow ! this was, very likely, all the French he 
knew, and he was proud of it ! Taking this as a 
gentle hint that we were to enter the saloon for pass- 
port purposes, we all poured into that apartment 
pele mele like your honourable house to the bar of 
the Lords. And here we found several empty bot- 
tles and a strong smell of cigar-smoke, which rather 
bore out the wag's story of the champagne and 
cigars ; and, sitting at a table, Mr. Wright, more 
toothy than ever, the captain, the helmets, and some- 
body else we little expected to see. 

There were only twenty-nine passengers standing 
round the table. Do you understand now? The 
thirtieth passenger was one of the lot — one of ces 
gens-ld— one of Count Orloff 's merry men. So, at 
least, I conjecture, for he was the somebody else at 
the table, and he asked me, with all the coolness in 
the world — when my turn came, and as if he had 
never seen me before in his life — what my object in 
coming to Russia might be ? I told him that I voy- 
aged pour mon plaisir, at which reply he seemed but 
moderately satisfied, and made a neat note of it on 



86 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

a sprawling sheet of paper. I had noticed that he 
had been very taciturn, and, as I thought, deaf, dur- 
ing our passage — a white-faced hound I — but that he 
took to his victuals and drink very kindly; and this 
was his object for coming to Russia. Of course, a 
Russian government employe may travel for his 
pleasure, like other folks; especially on a probable 
salary of about forty pounds a year ; and this pale 
functionary may have been returning from the baths 
of Spa or Wildbad ; but it was very suspicious. I 
wonder how much he paid for his passage ! 

We did not get our passports back yet — oh no ! 
but each traveller received a card on which was a 
big seal, in very coarse red wax, bearing the impress 
of the everlasting double eagle, and this was our 
passport from Cronstadt to Petersburg town. Very 
speedily and gladly we bade a long, long farewell to 
the " Preussischer Adler " and Captain StefFens ; 
and, giving up our sealing-wax passports, stepped 
on board the pyroscaphe. She had her name in gilt 
capitals on her paddle-boxes ; but I could not spell 
Russian then, and so remained ignorant on that sub- 
ject. I ought not to omit stating that Mr. Wright 
— after telling us in a jaunty manner, that it was 
beautiful weather, beautiful weather, and that we had 
had a charming passage — disappeared. He did not 
remain in the saloon, and he did not come with us. 
Perhaps he returned aloft to resume his cherub du- 
ties, or floated away, or melted away, or sank away. 
At all events, he went right away somewhere, and I 
saw him no more. 

During the three hours the pyroscaphe had been 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 87 

lying alongside the " Preussischer Adler," there had 
been a long plank, neatly carpeted, sloping from the 
gangway of one vessel to that of the other. The 
sight of this plank, all ready for walking upon, and 
yet tabooed to mortal footsteps, had tantalized and 
riled us not a little. On the bulwark of the Adler 
there had been laid, at right angles to it but also 
sloping downwards, a long, heavyish beam of wood 
painted in alternate black and white streaks, which 
was to serve as a hand-rail for the ladies when they 
made the descensus AvernL The opposite extremity 
of this beam was held by a Russian man-of-war's man 
on the pyroscaphe's deck ; a thick-set, mustachioed 
lout in white-duck cap, frock, and trousers. He 
held the beam in one hand, and supported his elbow 
with the other ; and there and thus I declare he held 
it during three mortal hours. It would have been 
about as easy for him to stand on one leg during 
that period. I lost sight of him occasionally, as I 
paced to and fro on the deck ; but, when I returned, 
he was always in the same position — stiff, motion- 
less, impassible, with the beam in his right hand and 
his elbow in his left. I do not know what amount 
of stick would have fallen to this poor fellow's share 
if he had flinched or stumbled ; but, when I tried to 
picture to myself an English, a French, or an Amer- 
ican sailor in a similar position, I could not help ad- 
mitting that Kussia is a country where discipline is 
understood, not only in theory, but in practice. 

The interior of the pyroscaphe did not belie her 
exterior. She was appointed throughout like an 
English nobleman's yacht. There was a tiny saloon 



88 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH, 

with rosewood fixings, distemper paintings in gilt 
frames, damask hangings, held up by ormolu Cu- 
pids, and mirrors galore for the fair ladies to admire 
themselves in. The little French actress immedi- 
ately converted one of them into the prettiest pic- 
ture frame you would desire to see in or out of 
Russia; and, leaving Miss Wapps to inspect her 
blue-bronzed nose in another, I went on deck, where 
there were benches on bronzed legs arid covered 
with crimson velvet, and camp-stools with seats 
worked in Berlin wool. I have been told that the 
officers of the Russian navy have a pretty talent in 
that genre of needlework. My Russian friend — 
who by this time had utterly forgotten (so it seemed) 
my existence — had found a friend of his in the per- 
son of the commander of the steamer, and the pair 
had retired to that officer's private cabin to drink 
champagne. Always champagne. I noticed that 
when they recognized each other at first, it was 
(oddly enough) in the French language that their 
salutations were interchanged. 

We were yet in the Gulf of Finland, and the 
canal of the Neva was still far off, when Captain 
Smith — who, it will be remembered, had gone over 
to the enemy, or Wapps faction — came over to me 
with overtures of peace. He had somehow man- 
aged to save those boots of his out of the general 
confiscation wreck, and carried them now like buck- 
ets. He had his reasons for an armistice, the cap- 
tain; for he remarked that we might be of great 
service to one another in the Custom-house. " You 
help me, and I'll help you," said Captain Smith. 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 89 

This was all very fair and liberal, and on the live 
and let live principle, which I heartily admire ; but, 
when the captain proffered a suggestion that I 
should help him by carrying the abhorred boots 
with the sheepskin linings, and proceeded to yoke 
me with them, milkman fashion, I resisted, and told 
him, like Gregory, that I'd not carry coals — nay, nor 
boots either. On this he went on another tack : 
and, conveying me to a secret place under the com- 
panion ladder, earnestly entreated me to conceal, on 
his behalf, underneath my waistcoat, a roll of very 
sleezy sky-blue merino, which he assured me was 
for a dress for his little daughter Gretchen, and 
which he had hitherto concealed in the mysterious 
boots. I must say that the sky-blue merino did not 
look very valuable : I don't think, in fact, that it 
was worth much more than a " tam ; " and I did not 
relish the idea of becoming an amateur smuggler on 
other merchant's account. But what was I to do ? 
The captain was a bore, but the father had a claim 
to my services. It was pleasant, besides, to think 
that the captain had a daughter at all — a bright- 
eyed little maid, with soft brown hair, perhaps ; and 
I pictured her to myself in the sky-blue merino, sit- 
ting on the captain's knee, while that giant mariner 
told her stories of his voyages on the salt seas, and 
forbore in love from saying anything about the per- 
ilous ice and the magnetic islands ; nay, glossed 
over his shipwreck off the Isle of Weasel, and made 
out the supercargo to be an angel of light rather 
than a " tam tief." So I smuggled Captain Smith's 
sky-blue merino through the Custom-house for him ; 



90 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

and if I had no sorer sin than that on my conscience, 
I should go to bed with a light heart to-night. 

In gratitude for this concession the captain pro- 
posed a drink, to which I nothing loth — for I was 
quite. faint with the heat and delay — consented. The 
refreshment-room was a little mahogany box below, 
with a cut-glass chandelier hanging from the ceil- 
ing, about half-a-dozen sizes too large for the apart- 
ment. There was a bar covered with marble, and a 
grave waiter in black, with a white neckcloth and 
white gloves : a waiter who looked as if, for private 
or political reasons, he was content to hand round 
schnapps, but that he could be an ambassador if he 
chose. There was a bar-keeper, whose stock of 
French was restricted to these three words. Eau-de- 
vie, Moossoo, and Rouble-argent. He made liberal 
use of these ; and I remarked that, although it was 
such a handsome pyroscaphe with a chandelier and 
camp stools worked in Berlin wool, the bar-keeper 
took very good care to have the rouble-argent in his 
hand, before he delivered the Eau-de-vie to a Moos- 
soo. Paying beforehand is the rule in Russia, and 
this is why the Russians are such bad paymasters. 
The little mahogany box is crammed with passen- 
gers, talking, laughing, and shaking hands with each 
other in pure good-nature, as men will do when 
they come to the end of a tedious journey. The 
wag from the south of France was in immense 
force, and incessantly ejaculated " Vodki ! Vodki!" 
capering about with a glass of that liquor in his 
hand, and drinking and hobnobbing with everybody. 



I LAND AT CnONSTADT. 91 

I tried a glass of vodki,* and immediately under- 
stood what genuine blue rain was. For this Vodki 
was bright blue, and it tasted — ugh ! of what did it 
not taste ? Bilge-water, vitriol, turpentine, copal- 
varnish, fire, and castor-oil! There was cham- 
pagne, and there was Lafitte, too, to be had. Cog- 
nac, brantewein, schnapps, aniseed (of which the 
Russians are immoderately fond), and an infinity of 
butter-brods spread with caviare — no more, no more 
of that ! — dried belouga, smoked salmon, cold veal, 
bacon, sardines, and tongue. I don't know the 
exact figures of the tariff of prices ; but I know 
that there was never any change out of a silver 
rouble. 

In this convivial little den, Captain Smith in his 
turn found a friend. This was no other than Peter- 
sen ; and nothing would serve Captain Smith, but 
that I must be introduced to Petersen. " De agent 
vor de gompany that used do go do Helsingfors," he 
whispered. What company, and what the deuce 
had I to do with the gompany, or with Petersen ? 
However, there was no help for it, and I was in- 
troduced. Petersen, daguerreotyped, would have 
passed very well for the likeness of Mr. Nobody ; for 
his large head was joined to his long legs, with no 
perceptible torso, and with only a very narrow inter- 
val or belt of red plush waistcoat between. He 
had the face of a fox who was determined to be 
clean shaved or to die ; and, indeed, there was not a 
hair left on his face, but he had gashed himself ter- 

* Or Yodka, both terminations seem to be used indilBferently. 



92 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

ribly in the operation, and his copper skin was laced 
with his red oxide of lead blood. He had a hat so 
huge and so furry in nap, that he looked with it on 
like the Lord Mayor's sword-bearer, and he may, 
indeed, have been the mysterious Sword-bearer's 
young man, of whom we heard so much during 
the sittings of the City Corporation Commission. 
When I was introduced to him as " Mister aus 
England," (which was all Captain Smith knew of 
my name), he opened his wide mouth, and stared at 
me with his fishy spherical eyes with such intensity, 
that I fancied that the sockets were popguns, and 
that he meant to shoot the aqueous globes against 
me. The open mouth, I think, really meant some- 
thing, signifying that Petersen was hungry, and 
desired meat ; for the Captain immediately after- 
wards whispered to me that we had better offer 
Petersen a beefsteak. Why any breakfast of mine 
should be offered to Petersen I know no more than 
why the celebrated Oozly bird should hide his head 
in the sand, and whistle through the nape of his 
neck; but I was stupefied, dazed with the vodki 
and the chandelier, the confusion of tongues, and 
Petersen's eyes and hat, and I nodded dully in con- 
sent. A beefsteak in Russia means meat and po- 
tatoes, and bread, cheese, a bottle of Moscow 
beer, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws in the way 
of pastry that may strike William Cook. Petersen, 
who had accepted the offer by lifting the sword- 
bearer's hat, began snapping up the food like a 
kingfisher; and as regards the payment, that we 
(Captain Smith being busily engaged somewhere 



I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 93 

else with his boots) turned out to be me, and 
amounted to a silver rouble. Three and threepence 
for Petersen ! He was to give me some valuable 
information about hotels, and so forth, Petersen ; 
but his mouth was too full for him to speak. Ho 
changed some money for me, however, and gave 
me, for my remaining thalers, a greasy Russian 
rouble note, and some battered copecks. I am in- 
clined to think that Petersen benefited by this 
transaction considerably. 

All at once there was a cry from the passengers 
above, of " Isaacs ! Isaacs ! " and, leaving Petersen 
still wolfing my beefsteak, I hastened on deck. "We 
had entered long since the canal of the broad, shal- 
low, false, shining, silvery Neva, in which the only 
navigable channel was marked out by flags. We 
had left on our right hand the palaces of Oranien- 
baum and PetergofF, and now we saw right ahead, 
flashing in the sun like the orb of a king, the bur- 
nished dome of the great cathedral of St. Izak. 
Then the vast workshops and ship-building yards of 
Mr. Baird ; then immense tallow warehouses, (look- 
ing like forts again,) and then, starting up on every 
side, not by twos or threes, but by scores, and start- 
ing up, as if by magic, the golden spires and domes 
of Petersburg ! 

I say starting up : it is the only word. Some 
half-dozen years ago I was silly enough to go up in 
a balloon, which, bursting at the altitude of a mile, 
sent its passengers down again. We fell over Ful- 
ham ; and I shall never forget the agonizing distinct- 
ness with which houses, chimneys, churches seemed 



94 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

rushing up to us instead of we coming down to 
them. I specially remember Fulham church steeple, 
on which I expected every moment to be transfixed. 
Now, though the plane was horizontal, not vertical, 
the effect was exactly similar ; and, as if from the 
bosom of the Neva, the churches and palaces started 
up. 

We went, straight as an arrow from a Tartar's 
bow, into the very heart of the city. No suburbs, 
no streets gradually growing upon you, no buildings 
gradually increasing in density. We were there; 
alongside the English quay, in sight of the Custom- 
house and Exchange, within a stone's throw of the 
Winter Palace, hard by the colossal statue of Peter 
the Great, nearly opposite the senate and the Saint 
Synode, close to the ministry of war, within view 
of the Admiralty, and under the guns of the fortress, 
before you could say Jack Robinson. 

The English quay ? Could this be Russia ? Pal- 
aces, villas, Corinthian columns, elegantly-dressed 
ladies with parasols and lapdogs, and children gaz- 
ing at us from the quay, handsome equipages, cur- 
vetting cavaliers, and the notes of a military band 
floating on the air. Yes : this was Russia ; and 
England was fifteen hundred real, and fifteen thou- 
sand moral, miles off. 

The handsome granite quays and elegantly-dressed 
ladies were not for us to walk on or with just yet. 
A double line of police sentries extended from a 
little pavilion in which we landed to a low white- 
washed archway on the other side of the quay, 
from which a flight of stone steps led apparently 



I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 95 

into a range of cellars. Walking, tired and dusty, 
through this lane of stern policemen (Liberty and 
the ladies peeping at us over the shoulders of the 
polizeis,) I could not resist an odd feeling that I 
had come in the van from the house of detention at 
Cronstadt to the county gaol at Petersburg, and 
that I was down for three months, with hard labour ; 
the last week solitary. Curiously enough, at balls, 
soirees, and suppers, at St. Petersburg, at Moscow, 
in town and country, I could never divest myself 
of that county-gaol feeling till I got my discharge 
at Cronstadt again, three months afterwards. 



IV. 



I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, AND TAKE MY FIRST 
RUSSIAN WALK. 

ScHiNDERHANNES, the rcnowucd robber of the 
Rhine, once encountered, so the story goes, in a 
foraging expedition between Mayence and Frank- 
fort, a caravan of a hundred and fifty Jews. It was 
a bitter January night : snow twelve inches deep on 
the ground, and Schinderhannes didn't like Jews. 
And so, in this manner, did he evilly entreat them. 
He did not slay them, nor skin them, nor extract 
their teeth, as did King John; but he compelled 
every man Moses of them to take off his boots or 



96 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

shoes. These he mixed, pell-mell, into a leathern 
salad, or boot-heap, and at daybreak, but not before, 
he permitted the poor frost-bitten rogues to find 
their chaussures, if they could. Setting aside the 
superhuman difficulty of picking out one's own 
particular boots among three hundred foot cover- 
ings, the subtle Schinderhannes had reckoned, with 
fiendish ingenuity, on the natural acquisitiveness of 
the Jewish race. Of course every Hebrew instinc- 
tively sought for the boots with the best soles and 
upper-leathers, and stoutly claimed them as his 
own ; men who had never possessed any thing bet- 
ter than a pair of squashy pumps, down at heel, 
and bulging at the sides, vehemently declared them- 
selves the rightful owners of brave jack-boots with 
triple rows of nails ; and the real proprietors, show- 
ing themselves recalcitrant at this new application 
of the law of meum and tuum, the consequence was 
a frightful uproar and contention : — such a fighting 
and squabbling, such a shrieking and swearing in 
bad Hebrew and worse German, such a rending of 
gabardines and tearing of beards, and clawing of 
hooked noses, had never been in Jewry, since the 
days of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. A friend of 
mine told me that he once saw the same experiment 
tried in a Parisian violon, or lock-up house, after a 
bal masque. The incarcerated postilions du Long- 
jumeau, titis, debardeurs, Robinson Crusoes, and 
forts de la halle becoming uproarious and kicking at 
the iron-stanchioned door, the sergents de ville en- 
tered the cell, and unbooted every living prisoner. 
And such a scene there was in the morning in the 



I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 97 

yard of the poste, before the masqueraders went to 
pay their respects to the Commissary of Police, that 
Monsieur Gavarni might describe it with his pencil, 
but not I, surely, with my pen ! 

I have related this little apologue to illustrate the 
characteristic, but unpleasant, proceedings of the 
Russian custom-house officers, when we had given 
up our keys, in one of the white-washed cellars on 
the basement of a building on the INGLISKAIA 
NABEREJENAIA, or English Quay, and when 
those officials proceeded to the examination of our 
luggage. Either they had read Mr. Leitch Ritchie's 
Life of Schinderhannes, or they had an intuitive per- 
ception of the modus agendi of the Robbers of the 
Rhine, or they had some masonic sympathy with 
the Parisian police agents ; for such a turning up 
of boxes and turning out of their contents, and 
mixture of their severalties, pell-mell, higgledy-pig- 
gledy, helter-skelter, jerry-cum-tumble, butter upon 
bacon, topsy-turvy, muck, mess, and muddle, I never 
saw in my life. There was a villanous douanier, 
who held a bandbox under one arm, and seemed 
desirous of emulating, the popular hattrick of Herr 
Dobler ; for he kept up a continual cascade of 
gloves, collars, eau-de-Cologne bottles, combs, hair- 
brushes, guide-books, pincushions, and lace cuffs, till 
I turned to look for the accomplice who was supply- 
ing him with fresh bandboxes. Now, the custom- 
house officers of every nation I have yet travelled 
through, have a different manner of examining your 
luggage. Your crusty, phlegmatic Englishman turns 
over each article separately but carefully. Your 
5 



98 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

stupid Belgian rummages your trunk, as if he were 
trying to catch a lizard ; your courteous Frenchman 
either lightly and gracefully turns up your fine linen, 
as though he were making a lobster salad, or — much 
more frequently — if you tell him you have nothing 
to declare, and are polite to him, just peeps into one 
corner of your portmanteau, and says, C^est assez I 
Your sententious German ponders deeply over your 
trunk, pokes his fat forefinger into the bosom of 
your dress-shirts, and motions you to shut it again. 
But none of these peculiarities had the Russians. 
They had a way of their own. They twisted, they 
tousted, they turned over, they held writing-cases 
open, bottom upwards, and shook out the manu- 
script contents, like snow-flakes. They held up 
coats and shirts, and examined them like pawn- 
brokers. They fingered ladies' dresses like Jew 
clothesmen. They punched hats, and looked into 
their linings ; passed Cashmere shawls from one to 
the other for inspection ; opened letters, and tried to 
read their contents, (upside down,) drew silk stock- 
ings over their arms ; held boots by the toes, and 
shook them ; opened bottles, and closed them again 
with the wrong corks ; left the impress of their dirty 
hands upon clean linen, and virgin writing-papers ; 
crammed ladies' under-garments into gentlemen's 
carpet-bags, forced a boot-jack into the little French 
actress's reticule, dropped things under foot, trod on 
them, tore them, and laughed, spilt eau-de-Cologne, 
greased silk with pomatum, forced hinges, sprained 
locks, ruined springs, broke cigars, rumpled muslin, 
and raised a cloud of pufF-powder and dentrifice. 



I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 99 

And all this was done, perhaps not wantonly, per- 
haps only in ignorant savagery ; but, with such a 
reckless want of the commonest care ; with such a 
hideous vicarme of shouting, screaming, trampling, 
and plunging, that the only light I could view the 
scene in — besides the Schinderhannes one — was in 
the improbable event of Mr. and Mrs. Keeley trav- 
elling through the country of the Patagonians, fall- 
ing into a gigantic ambuscade, and having their 
theatrical wardrobe overhauled by those overgrown 
savages. 

Yet I was given to understand that the search 
,was by no means so strict as it had habitually been 
in former years. Special instructions had even been 
issued by the government, that travellers were to be 
subjected to as little annoyance and delay in passing 
through the custom-house as were possible. That 
some rigour of scrutiny is necessary, and must be 
expected, I am not going, for one moment, to deny : 
the great object of the search being to discover books 
prohibited by the censure, and Russian bank-notes 
— genuine or forged (for the importation or exporta- 
tion of even good notes is illegal, and severely pun- 
ished.) Touching the books, the Russian govern- 
ment is wise. II est dans son droit. One volume 
of Mr. Carlyle would do more harm to the exist- 
ing state of things than millions of spurious paper 
roubles. Not but what the most jealous watchful- 
ness is justifiable in the detection of forged notes, 
and the prevention of the real ones leaving the 
country, as models for forgery. The paper currency 
is enormous ; there is nothing very peculiar about 



100 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the paper of the note, and, though its chalcography- 
is sufficiently complicated, and the dreadful pains 
and penalties denounced against the forgers, and 
the holders of forged notes, are repeated no less 
than three times in successively diminishing Rus- 
sian characters on the back ; the last repetition 
being literally microscopic ; it is all plain sailing in 
printing and engraving, and there are few clever 
English or French engravers, who would have any 
difficulty in producing an exact copy of the " Gossu- 
daria Kredit Billiet " of all the R-ussias. I have 
been told by government employes.^ and bankers' 
clerks, that they can detect a bad bank-note im- 
mediately and by the mere sense of touch ; but I 
apprehend that the chief test of genuineness is in 
the state into which every note passes after it has 
been for any time in circulation ; intolerable greasi- 
ness and raggedness. The mass of the people are 
so grossly ignorant, that the note might as well be 
printed in Sanscrit as in E-uss for them : they cannot 
even decipher the figures, and it is only by the colour 
of the note that an Ischvostchik or a Moujik is able 
to tell you its value. 

Among the hecatomb of luggage that had been 
brought from the deck of the pyroscaph into this 
cave of Trophonius, I had looked for some time 
vainly, for any thing belonging to me, one glimpse 
indeed I caught of my courier's bag, skimmering 
through the ak like a bird, and then all resolved 
itself into anarchy, the confusion of tongues, and 
the worse confusion of wearing apparel again. My 
keys were of not much service, therefore, to the 



I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 101 

officer in charge of them ; and it was of no use 
addressing myself to any of the douaniers or porters, 
for none of them spoke any thing but Russ. At 
length I caught sight of a certain big black trunk 
of mine groaning (to use a little freedom of illus- 
tration) under a pile of long narrow packing-cases 
(so long that they must have contained young trees, 
or stuffed giraffes,) addressed to his excellency and 
highness, &c.. Prince GortchakofF; and, being plas- 
tered all over with double eagle brands and seals, 
were, I suppose, inviolable to custom-house fingers. 
I pointed to the big black trunk ; I looked steadily 
at the custodian of my keys, and I slipped Peter- 
sen's paper rouble (crumpled up very small) into his 
hand. The pink lid of his little gray eye trembled 
with the first wink I had seen in Russia ; and, in 
another twinkling of that eye, my trunk was dragged 
from its captivity, and ready for examination. But 
there is a vicious key to that trunk which refuses 
to act till it has been shaken, punched, violently 
wrenched, and abusively spoken to ; and while the 
officer, having exhausted the first, was applying the 
last mode of persuasion (in Russ) I availed myself 
of the opportunity to chink some of the serviceable 
Petersen's copeck pieces in my closed hand. The 
key having listened to reason, my friend, with whom 
I was now quite on conversational terms, made a 
great show of examining my trunk : that is to say, 
he dived into it (so to speak) head foremost, and 
came up to the surface with a false collar in his 
teeth ; but it was all cry and no wool, and I might 
have had a complete democratic and socialist library 



102 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

and half a million in spurious paper money for 
aught he knew or cared. Then I gave him some 
more copecks, and said something to him in English, 
which I think he didn't understand ; to which he re- 
sponded with something in Russ, which I am per- 
fectly certain I didn't understand ; and then he 
chalked my box, and let me go free — to be taken 
into custody, however, immediately afterwards. He 
even recovered my courier's bag for me, which an 
irate douanier had converted into a weapon of of- 
fence, swinging it by a strap in the manner of the 
Protestant Flail to keep oiF over-impatient travellers. 
Such an oUa podrida as there was inside that couri- 
er's bag, when I came to examine it next morning ! 

I need scarcely- say that I had no Russian paper 
money with me, either in my luggage or on my per- 
son ; and I must admit, to the honour of the Rus- 
sian custom-house, that we were exempted from the 
irritating and degrading ceremony of a personal 
search. That system is, I believe, by this time, gen- 
erally exploded on the continent — flourishing only in 
a rank and weedy manner in the half-contemptible, 
half-loathsome Dogane of Austrian Italy, and (now 
and then, when the officials are out of temper) at 
the highly important seaport of Dieppe in France. 
As for books, I had brought with me only a New 
Testament, a Shakspeare, and a Johnson's Diction- 
ary. The first volume incurs no danger of confisca- 
tion in Russia. The Russians, to every creed and 
sect save Roman Catholicism and that branch of 
Judaism to which I h.ave previously alluded, are as 
contemptuously tolerant as Mahometans. Russian 



I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 103 

translations of the Protestant version of the Bible 
are common ; the volumes of the British and For- 
eign Bible Society are plentiful in St. Petersburg, 
and Russians of the better class are by no means 
reluctant to attend the worship of the Anglican 
Church, both in Moscow and Petersburg. But it is 
for the Romish communion that the Russians have 
the bitterest hatred, and for which all the energy of 
their persecution is reserved. Tolerated to some 
extent in the two capitals — as, where there are so 
many foreigners, it must necessarily be — it is uni- 
formly regarded with distrust and abhorrence by the 
Greek Church ; and I do believe that, in a stress of 
churches, an orthodox Russian would infinitely pre- 
fer performing his devotions before a pot-bellied 
fetish from Ashantee, than before the jewelled shrine 
of our Lady of Loretto. 

I think, on the whole, I passed through the custom- 
house ordeal rather easily than otherwise. Far dif- 
ferent was it with Miss Wapps, who, during the 
process of search, was a flesh sculptured monument 
of Giantess Despair, dovetailed with the three Fu- 
ries blended into one. This uncomfortable woman 
had in her trunk — for what purpose it is impossible 
to surmise — the working model of a power-loom, or 
a steam-plough, or a threshing-machine, or some- 
thing else equally mechanical and inconvenient ; 
and the custom-house officer, who evidently didn't 
know what to make of it, had caught his finger in a 
cogged wheel, had broken one of his nails, and was 
storming in a towering rage at Miss Wapps, in 
Russ; while she, in a rage quite overpowering his 



104 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

in volume, was objurgating him in English, till a 
superior official charged at Miss Wapps, Cossack 
fashion, with a long pen, and conveyed her, clam- 
ouring, away. 

Sundry red-bearded men, in crimson shirts and 
long white aprons, and with bare muscular arms, 
which would have been the making of them as 
artists' models in England, had been wrestling with 
each other and with me, both mentally and physi- 
cally, for the honour of conveying my luggage to a 
droschky. But much more had to be done before I 
could be allowed to depart. All the passengers had 
to enter an appearance before a fat old gentleman in 
green, and bright buttons, who sat in a high desk, 
like a pulpit, while a lean, long man, his subordi- 
nate, sat at another desk below him, like the parson's 
clerk. This fat old gentleman, who spoke English, 
French, and German wheezily but fluently, was 
good enough to ask me a few questions I had heard 
before: as my age, my profession, whether I had 
ever been in Russia before, and what might be my 
object in coming to Kussia now ? He entered my 
answers in a vast leger, and then, to my great joy, 
delivered to me my beloved Foreign-office docu- 
ment, with the advice to get myself immatriculated 
without delay. Then I paid more copecks to a dirty 
soldier sitting at a table, who made " Muscovite, his 
mark," on my passport — for I do not believe he could 
write; then more copecks again to another police- 
man, who pasted something like a small pitch-plaster 
on my trunk ; and then I struggled into a court-yard, 
where there was a crowd of droschkies ; and, secur- 



I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 105 

ing with immense difficulty two of these vehicles — 
one for myself and one for my luggage — was driven 
to the hotel where I had concluded to stop. 

You have seen, in one of the panoramas that in- 
fest our lecture-halls, after painted miles of river, or 
desert, or mountain have been unrolled, to the tink- 
ling of Madame Somebody on the piano, the canvas 
suddenly display the presentiment of a cheerful vil- 
lage, or a caravan of pilgrims, or an encampment of 
travellers, smoking and drinking under the green 
trees ; then the animated picture is rolled away into 
limbo again, and the miles of mountain, or river, or 
desert, begin again. 

So passed away the unsubstantial alliance of us 
thirty living travellers. We had walked, and talked, 
and eaten, and drunk together, and liked and disliked 
each other for three days and nights ; and now we 
parted in the droschky-crowded yard, never to meet 
again. To revisit the same cities, perhaps inhabit 
the same streets, the same houses, to walk on the 
same side of the pavement, even to remember each 
other often, but to meet again no more. So will it 
be, perchance, with Greater things in the beginning 
of the End ; and life-long alliances and friendships 
which we vainly call lasting, be reckoned merely as 
casual travelling companionships — made and broken 
in a moment in the long voyage that will last eternal 
years. 

I am incorrigible. If you want a man to explore 
the interior of Australia, or to discover the North- 
west Passage, or the sources of the Niger, don't send 

5* 



106 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

me. I should come back with a sketch of Victoria 
Street, Sydney, or the journal of a residence in Cape 
Coast Castle, or notes of the peculiarities of the 
skipper of a Hull whaler. If ever I write a biog- 
raphy it will be the life of John Smith ; and the 
great historical work which is to gild, I hope, the 
evening of my days, will be a Defence of Queen 
Elizabeth from the scandal unwarrantably cast upon 
her, or an Account of the death of Queen Anne. 
Lo ! I have spent a summer in Russia ; and I have 
nothing to tell you of the Altai mountains, the 
Kirghese tribes, Chinese Tartary, the Steppes, Kam- 
schatka, or even the Czar's coronation. [I fled the 
country a fortnight before it took place.] I have 
learnt but two Russian cities, [it is true I know my 
lesson by heart,] St. Petersburg and Moscow ; and 
my first-fruit of Petersburg is that withered apple 
the Nevskoi-Perspective. You know all about it 
already, of course. I can't help it. 

In Brussels my first visit is always to the Manne- 
ken. On arriving in Paris I always hasten, as fast 
as my legs can carry me, to the Palais Royal ; I 
think I have left a duty unaccomplished in London 
when I come to it after a long absence, if I delay an 
hour in walking down the central avenue of Covent 
Garden Market. These are cari luoghi to me, and 
to them I must go. I have not been twenty min- 
utes established in Petersburg, before I feel that I 
am due on the Nevskoi ; that the houses are waiting 
for me there ; that the Nevskoiians are walking up 
and down, impatient for me to come and contem- 
plate them. I make a mental apology for keeping 



I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 107 

the Nevskoi waiting, in order to indulge in a warm 
bath ; after w^hich I feel as if I had divested myself 
of about one of the twelve layers of dust that seem 
to have been accumulating on my epidermis since I 
left London. Then I reflect myself inwardly with 
my first Russian dinner ; and, then, magnanimously 
disdaining the aid of a valet de place, or even of a 
droschky-driver ; quite ignorant of Russ, and not 
knowing my right hand from my left in the way of 
Russian streets, I set boldly forth to find out the 
Nevskoi. 

It is about seven in the evening. I walk, say 
three quarters of a mile, down the big street in which 
my hotel is situated. Then I find myself in a huge 
triangular place, of which the quays of the Neva 
form one side, with an obelisk in the midst. I touch 
my hat to a bearded man in big boots, and say 
" Nevskoi ? " inquiringly. He takes off his hat, 
smiles, shows his teeth, makes a low bow, and 
speaks about a page of small pica in rapid Russ. I 
shake my head, say No bono, Johnny, (the only im- 
becile answer I can call up after the torrent of the 
unknown tongue,) and point to the right and to the 
left alternately, and with inquiring eyebrows. The 
bearded man points to the right — far away to the 
right, which I conjecture must be the other side of 
the river. " Na Prava," I think he says. I discover 
afterwards, that Na Pravo (the o pronounced as a 
French a) does mean to the right. To the right 
about I go, confidently. 

I cross a handsome bridge of stone and wrought 
iron, on which stands a chapel, before whose shrine 



108 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

crowds of people of all classes are standing or kneel- 
ing, praying, and crossing themselves devoutly. 
When I am on the other side of the bridge, and 
standing in a locality I have already been introduced 
to — the English quay — I accost another man, also 
in beard and boots, and repeat my monosyllabic 
inquiry : Nevskoi'. It ends, after a great deal more 
of the unknown tongue, by his pointing 'to the left. 
And to the left again I go, as bold as brass. 

I pursue the line of the quay for perhaps half a 
mile, then, bearing to the left, I find myself in an- 
other place so vast, that I begin to pitch and roll 
morally like a crazy bark on this huge stone ocean. 
It is vast, solitary, with a frowning palace-bound 
coast, and the Nevskoi harbour of refuge nowhere 
to be seen. But a sail in sight appears in the shape 
of a soldier. A sulky sail he is, however; and, 
refusing to listen to my signal gun of distress, holds 
on his course without laying-to. I am fain, for 
fear of lying-to myself all the day in this gi-anite 
Bay of Biscay, to grapple with a frail skiff in the 
person of a yellow-faced little girl, in printed cot- 
ton. Another monosyllabic inquiry, more unknown 
tongue (very shrill and lisping this time,) and ulti- 
mately a little yellow digit pointed to the northeast. 
Then I cross from where stands a colossal eques- 
trian statue, spurring fiercely to the verge of an arti- 
ficial rock and trampling a trailing serpent beneath 
his charger's feet, and on whose rocky pedestal there 
is the inscription " Petro Primo Catharina Secunda." 
I cross from the statue of Peter the Great some 
Weary hundreds of yards over stone billows, (so 



I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK.* 109 

wavy is the pavement,) to the northeast corner of 
that which I afterwards know to be the Admiral- 
tecskaia Plochtchad, or great square of the Admi- 
ralty ; but here, alas ! there is a palace whose walls 
seem to have no cessation for another half mile, 
northeast. And there are no more sails in sight, 
save crawling droschkies, and I begin to have a sen- 
sation that my compass must be near the magnetic 
islands, when I unpreparedly turn a sharp angle, 
and find myself among a throng of people, and in 
the Nevskoi Prospekt. 

It begins badly. It is not a wide street. It does 
not seem to be a long street. The shops don't look 
handsome ; the pavement is execrable, and though 
people are plenty, there is no crowd. It is like a 
London street on a Sunday turned into a Parisian 
street just after an emeute. It ought to be lively at 
half-past seven in the evening in the month of May, 
in the very centre of an imperial city of six hundred 
thousand inhabitants. But it isn't lively. It is quite 
the contrary : it is deadly. 

This is the place, then, I have been fretting and 
fuming to see : this is the Boulevard des ItaHens of 
St. Petersburg. This the Nevskoi. As for the per- 
spective, there is no perspective at all that I can see. 
It is more like Pimlico. Thef e is a street in that 
royalty-shadowed suburb called Churton Street, in 
which the Cubit- Corinthian mansions at its head 
melt gradually into the squalid hovels of Rochester 
Row, Westminster, at its tail. The houses on the 
Nevskoi are big, but I expect them to make a bad 
end of it. Here is a palace ; but not far off, I 



110 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

gloomily prophecy, must be Westminster, and the 
rat-catcher's daughter. And have I come all the 
way, not exactly from Westminster, but certainly 
^ from t'other side of the water, to see this ? By this 
time I have walked about twenty-five yards. 

I have not walked thirty-five yards, before my 
rashly-formed Nevskoi" opinions begin to change. I 
have not walked fifty yards, before I discover that 
the Nevskoi is imtaensely wide and stupendously 
long, and magnificently paved. I have not walked 
a hundred yards, before I make up my mind that 
the Nevskoi-Perspective is the handsomest and the 
most remarkable street in the world. 

There are forty perspectives, Mr. Bull, in this 
huge-bowelled city. I do not wish you to dislocate 
your jaw in endeavouring to pronounce the forty 
Muscovite names of these perspectives ; so, con- 
tenting myself with delicately hinting that there 
is the Vossnessensk Prospekt, likewise those of 
OboukhofF, PeterhofF, IsmailofF, and SemenOvskoi', 
I will leave you to imagine the rest, or familiarize 
yourself with them gradually, as they perspectively 
turn up in these my travels. But you are to remem- 
ber, if you please, that the Nevskoi extends in one 
straight line from the great square of the Admiralty 
to the convent of Saint Alecksander- Nevskoi, a dis- 
tance of two thousand sagenes, or four versts, or 
one French league, or three English miles ! And 
you will please to think of that, Mr. Bull, or Master 
Brooke, and agree with me that the Nevskoi is 
something like a street. This astonishing thorough- 
fare, now one corridor of palaces and churches, and 



I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. Ill 

gorged with the outward and visible riches of no- 
bles, and priests, and merchants, was, a century and 
a half ago, but a bridle-path through a dense forest 
leading from a river to a morass. The road was 
pierced in seventeen hundred and thirteen, and a 
few miserable wooden huts thrown together on its 
borders by the man who, under Heaven, seems to 
have made every mortal thing in Russia — Peter the 
Great. Now, you find on the Nevskoi" the cathedral 
of Our Lady of Kasan, the Lutheran church of 
Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the great Catholic 
church of the Assumption, the Dutch church, the 
imperial palace of Anitchkoff, the splendid Alexk- 
sandra theatre, the Place Michel, with its green 
English square, its palace, and its theatre ; the 
StrogonofF Palace, the E-oumiantzoff Palace, the 
Galitzin Palace, the Belozelski Palace, the Bran- 
itzky Palace, the — the — for goodness' sake, go fetch 
a guide-book, and see how many hundred palaces 
more ! On the Nevskoi are the facades of the 
curious semi- Asiatic bazaar, the Gostinnoi-Dvor, 
the imperial library, (O! British Museum quadran- 
gles, glass roof, duplicate copies, five thousand 
pounds' worth of decoration, museum flea, and all, 
you are but a book-stall to it !) the Armenian 
church, the monuments of Souvorov, (our Suwar- 
row, and spelt in E-uss thus : Cybopob,) of Barclay 
de Tolly. On to the Nevskoi" debouch the aristo- 
cratic Morskaias, which, the Balchoi and the Mala, 
or Great and Little, are at once the Bond Streets 
and the Belgravias of Petersburg. On to the Nev- 
skoi opens the Mala Millione, a short but courtly 



112 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

street terminated by a triumphal archway, mon- 
strous and magnificent, surmounted by a car of 
Victory, with its eight horses abreast in bronze, and 
through which you may descry the red granite col- 
umn of the Czar Alexksandra Pavlovitch (Na- 
poleon's Alexander) and the immense Winter Pal- 
ace. On to the Nevskoi yawns the long perspective 
of the Liteinaia, the dashing street of the Cannous- 
china, or imperial stables, the palace and garden- 
lined avenue of the Sadovvaia, or Great Garden 
Street. And the Nevskoi is intersected by three 
Venice-like canals ; by the canal of the Moika, at 
the Polizeisky-Most, or Police Bridge ; by the Eka- 
terininskpi, at the Kasansky-Most, or Kasan Bridge; 
and by the Fontanka (Count OrlofF's office — the 
office where ladies have been, like horses, " taken in 
to bait" — is on the Fontanka) at the AnitchkofF 
Bridge. At about five hundred sagenes from this 
bridge there is another canal, but not quite so hand- 
some a one — the Ligoff". And at one extremity of 
this Nevskoi of wonders is a convent as big as 
an English market-town, and with three churches 
within its walls, while the other end finishes with 
the tapering golden spire of the Admiralty, (there 
are two Admiralties in this town-residence of the 
Titans,) which Admiralty has a church, a library, 
an arsenal, a museum, a dockyard, and a cadets' 
college under its roof, and such an unaccountable 
host of rooms, that I think every cabin-boy in the 
fleet must have a separate apartment there when he 
is on shore, and every boatswain's cat have a pri- 



I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 113 

vate storeroom for each and every one of its nine 
tails. 

At the first blush, seven in the evening would not 
seem precisely the best chosen time for the minute 
examination of a street one had never seen before. 
In England or France, at this early spring-time, it 
would be sunset, almost twilight, blind man's holi- 
day. And there is not a gas-lamp on the Nevskoi 
to illumine me in my researches. The posts are 
there : massive, profusely ornamented pillars of 
WTOUght-iron or bronze ; but not a lamp for love or 
money. But you will understand the place when I 
tell you that it will be broad staring daylight on the 
Nevskoi till half-past eleven of the clock tdftiight ; 
that after that time there will be a soft, still, dreamy, 
mysterious semi-twilight, such as sometimes veils 
the eyes of a woman you love, when you are sitting 
silent by her side, silent and happy, thinking of her, 
while she, with those inscrutable twilight orbs, is 
thinking of — God knows what, (perhaps of the 
somebody else by whose side she used to sit, and 
whom you would so dearly love to strangle, if it 
were all the same to her;) and then, at half-past 
one in the morning, comes the brazen staring morn- 
ing light again. For from this May middle to the 
end of July, there will be no more night in St. 
Petersburg. 

No night ! why can't you cover up the sky then ? 
why not roof in the Nevskoi — the whole bad city — 
with black crape ? Why not force masks on all 
your slaves, or blind them ? For, as true as heaven, 
there are things done here that God's sun should 



114 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

never shine upon. Cover up that palace. Cover 
up that house on the Fontanka. Cover up, for 
shame's sake, that police-yard, that Christians may 
not hear the women scream. Cover them up thick 
and threefold ; for of a surety, if the light comes 
in, the truth will out, and Palace and Fontanka, 
house and Gaol-yard walls will come tumbling 
about your ^ars, insensate and accursed, and crush 
Jou7 

At the Admiralty corner of the Nevsko'i, I make 
my first cordial salutation to the fine arts in Russia. 
This long range of plate-glass windows appertains 
to an ingenious Italian, Signor Daziaro, whose 
handsihie print-shop, with the elaborate Russian 
inscription on the frontage, has no doubt often 
pleased and puzzled you on the Boulevard des 
Capucines in Paris ; and who has succursal fine- 
arts' establishments in Moscow, in Warsaw, and I 
believe also in Odessa, as well as this one in St. 
Petersburg. Daziaro is the Russian Ackermann's. 
For the newest portrait of the Czar, for the latest 
lithographs of the imperial family, for the last 
engraving after Sir Edwin Landseer, the last pay- 
sage by Ferogio, the last caricature (not political, 
be it well understood, but of a Lorette or debardeur 
tendency) of Gavarni or Gustave de Beaumont, 
you must go to Daziaro's. His windows, too, dis- 
play the same curious thermometer of celebrity as 
those of our printsellers. A great man is disgraced, 
and sinks into oblivion. One day he dies, and then- 
people suddenly remember him, (for about two. 
days,) as he was before he wasn't. Presto ! his por- 



I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 115 

trait appears in Daziaro's window. Half-a-dozen 
copies of his portrait are sold during his two days' 
resuscitation ; and then he is relegated to the port- 
folio again, and slumbers till his son wins a battle, 
or runs away with somebody else's wife, or is made 
a minister, or is sent to Siberia, or does something 
for people to remember and talk about (for about 
two days more,) what Monsieur his father was. 
When, failing the son's portrait, the astute DaMaro 
gives the respected progenitor another airing in the 
print-shop window ; and so on till we ripe and rot, 
all of us. And thereby hangs a tale. Is this only 
Russian ? Is it not so the whole world 'Over ? 
There was a thermometer of this sort in a'prii^shop 
at the corner of Great and Little Queen Streets, 
Lincoln's-Inn Fields, London, which I used to pass 
every morning ; and the fresh portraits in the win- 
dow were as good as the news of^ the day to me. 
The thermometer in Daziaro's is more apparent, 
more significant, and more frequently consulted ; 
for this is a country where the news of the day is 
scarce ; where, in an intolerable quantity of waste 
paper, there is about a copeck's worth of news ; and 
where the real stirring daily intelligence is muttered 
in dark entries, and whispered behind hands in 
boudoirs, and glozed from lip to ear over tumblers 
of tea, and scribbled on blank leaves of pocket- 
books passed hastily from hand to hand, and then 
the blank leaves converted instantly into pipe-lights. 
As a general rule you can find out much easier 
what is most talked about by consulting Signor 
Daziaro's window, in preference to the Journal de 
St. Petersbourg, 



116 A JOURNJP DUE NORTH. 

Art, Daziaro passim^ is in no want of patrons. 
The shop is thronged till ten o'clock in the even- 
ing (when all shops on the Nevskoi' are closed). 
The stock of prints seems to comprise the very 
rarest and most expensive ; and you may be sure 
that a liberal percentage has been added to the 
original price (however heavy) to meet the peculiar 
views of the E-ussian public. The Kussian public — 
thaVwhich rides in carriages, and can buy beautiful 
prints, and has a soul to be saved— the only Russian 
public that exists of course, or is recognized on the 
Nevskoi ; this genteel public does not like, and will 
not buy cheap things. Cheap things are low, com- 
mon,||ulgar, not fit for nous autre s. Ivan Ivano- 
vitch, the Moujik, buys cheap things. And so arti- 
cles must not only be dear, but exorbitantly dear, or 
Andrei Andreivitch the merchant, who is rich but 
thrifty, would compete with nous autres^ which 
would never do. Andrei will give a hundred roubles 
for his winter fur. This would be shocking to the 
genteel public ; so crafty Frenchmen and Germans 
open shops on the Nevskoi^ where a thousand sil- 
ver roubles are charged and given for a fur pelisse, 
not much superior to the merchant's. 

There are dozens of these " Pelz-Magasins," or 
furriers' shops, on the splendid Nevskoi', and even 
more splendid are their contents. In a country 
which even in the hotest summer may be described 
as the Polar Regions with the chill off — (imagine, if 
you like, a red-hot poker substituted for the icy pole 
itself) — and which for five, and sometimes six 
months in the year is a frigid hell, it may be easily 



I TAKE MY FIEST RUSSIAN WALK. 117 

conceived that furs, with us only the ornaments of 
the luxurious, are necessities of life. Ivan the 
Moujik does not wear a schooba or fur pelisse, but 
pauvre diable as he is, scrapes together eight or ten 
silver roubles wherewith to buy a touloupe, or coat 
of dressed sheepskin, whose woolly lining keeps him 
tolerably warm. But the humblest employe to 
Prince Dolgorouki, every one above the condition 
of a serf must have a schooba of some sort or other 
for winter. Some wear catskins, like my friend the 
Jew, who wanted me to buy the kibitka at Stettin. 
The Gostinnoi Dvor merchants wear pelisses of 
white wolfskin underneath their long cloth caftans. 
The fur of the squirrel, the Canada marmot, aild the 
silver fox of Siberia, are in great request for the 
robes of burgesses' wives and employes^ ladies. The 
common soldiers wear sheepskins under their gray 
capotes, the officers have cloaks lined with the fur 
of the bear or wolf. But Nous Autres — the Dvory- 
anin or Russian noble — the Seigneur, with his hun- 
dreds of serfs and hundreds of thousands of roubles 
— for him and for Madame la Princesse, his spouse, 
are reserved the sable pelisse, the schooba of almost 
priceless furs, thick, warm, and silky ; a garment 
that is almost an inheritance, and which you spend 
almost an inheritance to acquire. One hundred and 
fifty pounds sterling — I have observed this — is the 
price of a first-class schooba on the Nevskoi. There 
are to be sure, certain murky warehouses in the 
Gostinnoi Dvor, where a Russian with a taste for 
bargaining and beating down (and that taste is 
innate to the Muscovite) may purchase a sable 



118 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

pelisse for a third of the money mentioned. In 
Germany, particularly at Leipsic, furs or schoppen 
are still cheaper ; and one pelisse to each traveller 
passes through the custom-house duty free ; yet the 
Russian aristocracy neglect this cheap mart, and 
hold by the Nevskoi' Pelz-Magasins. We all re- 
member what Hudibras says of the equality of 
pleasure between cheating and being cheated. 

Next in importance to the furriers are the jewel- 
lers. Now I comprehend why the profession of a 
diamond-merchant is so important in Leipsic and 
Amsterdam, and where the chief market for dia- 
monds is to be found. Every jeweller's window has 
an Alnaschar's basket of almost priceless gems dis- 
played in it. Rings, bracelets, necklaces, carcans, 
vivi^res, ear-rings, stomachers, bouquets, fan-mounts, 
brooches, solitaires, — all blazing with diamonds so 
large that the stock of Howell and James, or Hunt 
and Roskell, would look but a'fe peddlers' packs of 
penny trinkets beside them. No money in Russia ! 
Put that figment out of your head as soon as ever 
you can : there is enough wealth in these Nevskoi 
shop-windows to carry on a big war for half-a-dozen 
years longer. They are not outwardly splendid 
though, these jewellers. No plate-glass, no Corin- 
thian columns ; no gas-jets with brilliant reflectors^ 
There is an oriental dinginess and mystery about 
the exterior of the shops. The houses themselves in 
w^hich the shops are situated have a private look, 
like the banker's or the doctor's or the lawyer's in an 
English country town magnified a. thousand-fold ; 
and the radiant stock is displayed in something like 



I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 119 

a gigantic parlour window, np a steep flight of steps. 
There is a miserable Moujik, in a crassy sheepskin, 
staring in at the diamonds, munching a cucumber 
meanwhile. This man-chattel is a slave, condemned 
to hopeless bondage, robbed, despised, kicked, beaten 
like a dog ; and he gazes at Prince LegreeskofF's 
jewels with a calmly critical air. What right ? — but, 
be quiet ; if I come to right, what right have I to 
come to Muscovy grievance-hunting, when I have 
left a thousand grievances at home, crying to heaven 
for redress ? 

The tailors, whose name is that of ten legions, 
and who are very nearly all French and Germans, 
have no shops. They have magnificent suites of 
apartments on Nevskoi first-floors ; and their charge 
for making a frock-coat is about eight guineas ster- 
ling, English. You understand now what sort of 
tailors they are. They are too proud, too high and 
mighty, to content themselves with the simple sar- 
torial appellation, and have improved even upon 
our home-snobbery in that line ; calling themselves 
not only Merchant Tailors, but Kleider meisters 
( Clothes masters) ; Undertakers for Military Habili- 
ments (Entrepreneurs d^habillemens militaires) ; Con- 
fectioners of Seignorial Costume, and the like high- 
sounding titles. You are to remember that St. 
Petersburg is permanently garrisoned by the Impe- 
rial Guard, which is something like one hundred 
and fifteen thousand strong ; that the epauletted 
mob of officers (whose pay is scarcely sufficient to 
defray the expenses of their boot-varnish) are, with 
very few exceptions, men of large fortune, arid that 



120 A JOUENEY DUE NORTH. 

the government does not find them in so much as a 
button towards their equipment. And as the uni- 
forms are gorgeous in the extreme, and very easily- 
spoilt, the Undertaker of Military Habiliments makes 
rather a good thing of it than otherwise in the capi- 
tal of the Tsar. 

Bootmakers abound — Germans, almost to a man 
— whose grim shops are fortalices of places, with 
stern jack-boots frowning at you through the win- 
dows. And shops and palaces, palaces and shops, 
succeed each other for mile after mile, till I am fairly 
worn out with magnificence, and, going home to 
bed, determine to take the Nevskoi-mixture as be- 
fore, to-morrow. 



V. 

ISCHVOSTCHIK I THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 



I 



I AM not quite certain, I must premise, as to the 
orthography of the K/Ussian Cabby's name. It is a 
national characteristic of the Russians, never to give 
a direct answer to a question ; and, although I have 
asked at least twenty times, of learned Russians 
how to spell the droschky-driver's appellation with 
correctness, the philologists were for the most part 
evasively dubious and readier to ask me questions 
about the head-dresses of the British Grenadiers, 



ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 121 

than to give me a succinct reply. Perhaps, they 
have not themselves yet made up their minds as to 
the proper position of the vowels and consonants in 
the word ; for, though M. Karamsin is generally un- 
derstood to have settled the Russian language some 
years since, considerable orthographical license yet 
prevails, and is, to some extent, tolerated. A sover- 
eign, less conciliating than the Czar Alexander, 
would very soon set the matter right by an oukase ; 
and woe to the Russian then, who didn't mind his 
T's and Q's ! As it is, there seem to be as many 
ways of pronouncing the cabby's name, as the 
American prairie. I have heard him myself called 
indifferently Ischvostchik, istvosschik, issvostchik, 
and isvoschchik. When you hail him in the street, 
you are permitted to take another liberty with his 
title, and call out lustily iss'vosch ! 

The choice of a subject in the driver of a public 
conveyance, in any city, familiar as he must be to 
every traveller, is not very defensible on the score of 
novelty ; but — as I should not have the sKghtest 
hesitation in taking a Piccadilly Hansom cabman as 
a type of character, and drawing him as best I 
could to the life, if I had a salutary purpose to serve 
— I shall make no more bones about sketching the 
ischvostchik, than if he were a new butterfly, or an 
inedited fern, or a Niam-Niam, or any other rare 
specimen entomological or zoological. And I have 
a plea, if needful, wherewith to claim benefit of 
clergy ; this : that the ischvostchik is thoroughly, 
entirely, and to the back bone, in speech, dress, look, 
manners, and customs, Russian. 
6 



122 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

I was repeatedly told, while yet new to the Holy 
Land, that I must not take St. Petersburg as by any 
means a sample of a genuine Russian city. It was 
a French, a German, an English, a cosmopolitan 
town — what you will ; but for real Russian customs 
and costumes, I must go to Moscow, to Novgorod, 
to Kasan, to Smolensk, to KharkofF, or to Vladimir. 
Error. I do not think that in the whole world there 
exists a nation so thoroughly homogeneous as Rus- 
sia. In our little scrap of an island, there are two- 
score dialects, at least, spoken ; and a real north- 
countryman can scarcely make himself understood 
to a southerner ; but here, if you will once bear in 
mind the two divisions of race into Great Russians, 
and Little Russians, you may go a thousand versts, 
without finding a vowel's difference in accentuation, 
or a hair's breadth alteration in a caftan, or a Ka- 
koshnik. The outlying nationalities subject to the 
Double Eagle's sway — the Fins, the Laps, the Ger- 
man Russians, (Esthonians, Livonians, &c.,) the 
Poles, the Cossacks, and the Tartars, have of course 
their different languages and dresses ; but they are 
not Russians : the Imperial Government recognizes 
their separate nationality in everything save taxing 
them, making soldiers of them, and beating them ; 
but the vast mass of millions — ^the real Russians — 
are from province to province, from government to 
government, all alike. At the end of a week's jour- 
ney, you will find the same villages, the same priests, 
the same policemen, the same Moujiks and Ischvost- 
chiks, in appearance, dress, language, and habits, as 
at the commencement of your voyage. You who 



ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 123 

have crossed St. George's Channel to Dublin, or the 
Grampians to Edinburgh, will remember the striking 
contrast between the cabman you left in London, 
and the Irish car-driver who rattled you up West- 
moreland Street, or the canny Jehu who conveyed 
you in a cab to your hotel in the Scottish metropo- 
lis. Take but a jaunt of half a dozen miles by rail 
out of London, and you will scarcely fail to remark 
the difference between Number nine hundred and 
nine from the Wellington Street stand, and the 
driver of the fly from the Queen's Arms, or the Ter- 
minus Hotel. They are quite different types of 
coachmanhood. But in Russia,* the Ischvostchik 
who drives you from the Admiralty at St. Peters- 
burg, to the Moscow railway station, is, to a hair of 
his beard, to a plait in his caftan, to a sneezing 
penultimate in his rapid Russ, the very counterpart, 
the own Corsican brother, of the Ischvostchik who 
drives you from the terminus to the Bridge of the 
Marshals in Holy Moscow, four hundred and fifty 
miles away. Stay: there is one difference in cos- 
tume. The Petersburg Ischvostchik wears a pecu- 
liar low-crowned hat, with a broad brim turned up 
liberally at the sides ; whereas, the Moscow cabby, 
more particularly, affects a Tom and Jerry hat with 
the brim pared closely off, and encircled by a ribbon 
and three or four buckles — a hat that has some re- 
mote resemblance to a genuine Connaught bogtrot- 
ter's head covering. Du reste, both styles of hat are 
common, and indifferently worn by the Moujiks all 
over Russia, only the low-crowned hat being covered 
with a silk nap, and in some cases with beaver, is 



124 A JOUKNEY DUB NORTH. 

the more expensive, and is, therefore, in more gen- 
eral use in Petersburg the luxurious. Don't believe 
those, therefore, who endeavour to persuade you of 
the non-Russianism of St. Petersburg. There is a 
great deal of eau-de-Cologne consumed there; the 
commerce in white kid gloves is enormous ; and 
there is a thriving trade in wax candles, pineapple 
ices, patent leather boots, Clicquot's champagne, 
crinoline petticoats, artificial flowers, and other ad- 
juncts to civilization. Grisi and Lablache sing at 
the Grand Opera; Mademoiselle Cerito dances 
there ; French is habitually spoken in society ; and 
invitations to balls and dinners are sent to you on 
enamelled cards, and in pink billets smelling of musk 
and miilefleurs ; but your distinguished Origin may 
come away from the AfFghan ambassador's balls, or 
the Grand Opera, or the Princess LiagouschkofF's 
tableaux vivans, your head full of Casta Diva, the 
Valse a deux temps, and the delightful forward- 
ness of Russian civilization ; and your Origin will 
hail an Ischvostchik to convey you to your domicil ; 
and right before you, almost touching you, astride 
on the splashboard, will sit a genuine rightdown 
child of Holy Russia, who is (it is no use mincing 
the matter) an ignorant, beastly, drunken, idolatrous 
savage, who is able to drive a horse, and to rob, and 
no more. Woe to those who wear the white kid 
gloves, and serenely allow the savage to go on in his 
dirt, in his drunkenness, in his most pitiable joss- 
worship (it is not religion), in his swinish ignorance, 
not only (it were vain to dwell upon that) of letters, 
but of things that the very dumb dogs and necessary 



ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVEE. 125 

cats in Christian households seem to know instinc- 
tively ! Woe to the drinkers of champagne when 
the day shall come for these wretched creatures to 
grow raving mad instead of sillily maudlin on the 
vitriol brandy, whose monopoly brings in a yearly 
revenue of fifty millions of roubles (eight millions 
sterling) to the paternal government, and when the 
paternal stick shall avail no more as a panacea. I 
know nothing more striking in my Russian experi- 
ence, than the sudden plunge from a hothouse of 
refinement to a cold bath of sheer barbarism. It is 
as if you left a presidential lev^e in the White 
House at Washington, and fell suddenly into an 
ambuscade of Red Indians. Your civilization, your 
evening dress, your carefully selected stock of pure 
Parisian French, avail you nothing with the Isch- 
vostchik. He speaks nothing but Russ ; he cannot 
read ; he has nothing, nothing in common with you 
— closely shaven (as regards the cheeks and chin) 
and swathed in the tight sables of European eti- 
quette, as you are — he in his flowing oriental caftan, 
and oriental beard, and more than oriental dirt. 

It is possible, nay a thing of very common occur- 
rence, for a foreigner to live half a dozen years in 
Russia, without mastering the Russian alphabet, or 
being called upon to say, " How do you do ? " or 
" Good-night ! " in Russ. Many of the highest 
Russian nobles are said indeed to speak their own 
language with anything but fluency and correctness. 
But, unless you want to go afoot in the streets, 
(which in any Russian town is about equivalent to 
making a pilgrimage to the Holy House at Loretto, 



126 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

with unboiled peas in your shoes,) it is absolutely- 
necessary for you to acquire what I may call the 
Ischvostchik language, in order to let your conduc- 
tor know your intended destination. The language 
is neither a very difficult, nor a very copious one. 
For all locomotive purposes it may be resumed into 
the following ten phrases. 

1. Na prava — To the right. 

2. Na leva— To the left. 

8. Pouyiama — Straight on. Right a-head. 

4. Stoi— Stop! 

5. Pashol-Scorrei— Quick, go a-head. 

6. Shivai — Faster. 

7. Dam na Vodka — I'll stand something to drink 
above the fare. 

8. Durak — Fool. 

9. Sabakoutchelovek — Son of a dog ! 
10. Tippian — You're drunk. 

These phrases are spelt anyhow ; the Ischvostchik 
language being a Lingua non scripta, and one that I 
studied orally, and not grammatically ; but I have 
written them to be pronounced as in French ; and, 
if any of my readers, intending to visit Russia, will 
take the trouble to commit this slender vocabulary 
to memory, they will find them to all droschky- 
driving intents and purposes sufficient for their ex- 
cursions in any Russian town from Petersburg to 
Kasan. 

There are some facetious Russians who supersede 
the verbal employment of the first four of these 
phrases by synonymous manual signs. Thus, being 
always seated outside, and immediately behind the 



ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 127 

driver, they substitute for " to the right," a sharp 
pull of the Ischvostchik's right ear. Instead of cry- 
ing '' to the left," they pull him by the sinister organ 
of hearing ; a sound " bonneting" blow on the low- 
crowned hat, or indeed, a blow or a Idck anywhere 
is considered as equivalent to a gentle reminder to 
drive faster ; and, if you wish to pull up, what is 
easier than to grasp the Ischvostchik by the throat 
and twine your hand into his neckerchief, pulling 
him violently backwards, meanwhile, till he chokes 
or holds hard ? It is not often, I confess, that this 
humorous system of speech without words is re- 
quired, or, at least, practised in Petersburg or Mos- 
cow ; but in the country, where Nous Autres are at 
home, these, and numerous other waggish modes of 
persuasive coercion, are in use for the benefit of the 
Ischvostchik, I remember a young Russian gentle- 
man describing to me his overland kibitka journey 
from Moscow to Warsaw. He travelled with his 
mother and sister ; it was in the depth of winter ; 
and he described to me, in freezing accents, the hor- 
rors of his situation, compelled as he was to sit out- 
side the kibitka by the side of the Ischvostchik, (or 
rather yemschik ; for, w^hen the droschky-driver drives 
post-horses he becomes a postilion, whether he be- 
stride his cattle or the splash-board.) " Outside," I 
said, "was there no room inside the carriage?" 
" O, yes ! plenty of room," was the naive reply of 
this young gentleman ; " but you see I had to sit on 
the box, because we had no servant with us, and 
there was nobody to beat the postilion." For the 
Russian driver on a Russian road, receives always 



128 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

as much, and frequently much more, stick than his 
cattle. (Ischvostchiks and Yemschiks are proverbi- 
ally merciful to their beasts.) You have to beat 
him whether you fee him or not. Without the stick 
he will go to sleep, and will not incite his horses into 
any more rapid pace than that which is understood 
by a snail's gallop. It is a sad thing to be obliged 
to record ; but it is a fact, that even as money makes 
the mare to go, so it is the stick that makes the Rus- 
sian driver to drive ; and, just as in the old days of 
Irish posting it used to be necessary for the near 
leader to be touched up on the flank with a red-hot 
poker before he would start, so the signal for depar- 
ture to a kibitka driver is ordinarily a sounding 
thwack across the shoulders. 

In the two great capitals, happily, words will serve 
as well as blows ; and to the Petersburg or Moscow 
Ischvostchik the intimation of " Dam na vodka," or 
even " vodka," simply, will seldom fail in procuring 
an augmentation of speed. But I grieve to say that 
the epithets, " fool ! " " you're drunk ! " and especially 
the terrible adjuration " sabakoutchelovek ! " " son of 
a dog!" are absolutely necessary in your converse 
with the Ischvostchik, particularly when the subject 
of fare comes to be discussed. Every Ischvostchik 
will cheat his own countrymen, and I need not say 
will stick it on to foreigners in the proportion of 
about two hundred and eighty-five per cent. He 
will not have the slightest hesitation in asking a 
rouble for a fifteen kopecks' course; and it is all 
over with you if you hesitate for a moment, or en- 
deavour to reason out the matter (by nods, smiles, 



ISCHVOSTCHTK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 12B 

and shrugs) amicably. Pay him the proper fare, ac- 
companying the payment by the emphatic " durak ! " 
If this does not satisfy the Ischvostchik, utter the 
magical sabakoutchelovek in the most awful voice 
you can command, and walk away. If he presume 
to follow you, still demanding mpre money, I scarcely 
know what to advise you to do ; but I know, and 
the Ischvostchik knows also, to his sorrow, what 
.Nous Autres do under such circumstances. One 
thing, in charity and mercy, I entreat you not to do. 
Don't call in a police-soldier to settle the dispute. 
As sure as ever you have that functionary for an 
arbitrator, so sure are you to be mulcted of some 
more money, and so sure is the miserable Ischvost- 
chik, whether right or wrong, whether he has received 
under or over fare, so sure is that slave of a slave 
either to have his nose flattened or a tooth or two 
knocked down his throat on the spot by the fist of 
the boutosnik, or police-soldier, or to be made to 
look in at the next convenient opportunity at the 
nearest police-station, or siege, and there to be 
scourged like a slave as he is, and like a dog as he 
ought not to be. 

The way these wretched men are beaten, both 
openly and privately, is revolting and abominable. 
I have seen a gigantic police-soldier walk coolly 
down the Nevskoi, from the Pont de Police to the 
Kasan church, beating, cuffing across the face, pull- 
ing by the hair, and kicking every single one of the 
file of Ischvostchiks who, with their vehicles, line 
the kerb. To the right and left, sometimes on to 
the pavement, sometimes into the kennel and under 

6* 



128 

^yJ A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

their horses' feet, went the poor bearded brutes un- 
der the brawny fists of this ruffianly Goliath in a 
gray gaberdine. I saw him remount the Nevskoi 
to his standing-place, exactly repeating his pugilistic 
recreation — saw it from a balcony overhanging this 
same Nevskoi, where I was standing with ladies, 
and with officials in clanking spurs. We had a lap- 
dog, too, in the balcony, and in the saloon inside an 
Italian music-master was capering with his nimble 
fingers on a grand piano ; while down below, the 
man in gray was felling the Ischvostchiks. What 
their offence had been — whether standing an inch 
too close to, or an inch too far from the pavement, I 
do not know ; but I know that they were, and that 
. I saw them, thus beaten ; and I know that they took 
their hats off, and meekly wiped the blood from their 
mouths and noses ; and gave way to not one word 
or gesture of resistance or remonstrance ; but I know 
that, in the wake of that bad ship Graycoat, there 
were left such a trail of white vengeful faces, of such 
gleaming eyes, of such compressed lips, that were I 
Graycoat I would as soon pass through the nether- 
most pit, as down that line of outraged men, alone, 
at night, and without my police helmet and my 
police sword. 

It is not pleasant, either, to know that every time 
your unfortunate driver happens to lock the wheel 
of a private carriage he is due at the police-station, 
there to consume the inevitable ration of stick ; it is 
horribly unpleasant to sit, as I have often done, be- 
hind a fine stalwart bearded man — a Hercules of a 
feUow — and, when you see the tips of a series of 



ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. IB 

scarlet and purple wheals appearing above the collar 
of his caftan and ending at the nape of his neck, to 
be convinced after much elaborate inductive reason- 
ing, that there are some more wheals under his 
caftan — that his back and a police-corporal's stick 
have come to blows lately, and that the stick has 
had the best of it. 

A droschky is a necessary of life in Russia ; it is 
not much a subject for astonishment, therefore, that 
there should be above three thousand public drosch- 
kies alone in Saint Petersburg, and nearly two thou- 
sand in Moscow. Besides these, there are plenty of 
hack-caleches and broughams, and swarms of small 
private one-horse droschkies. Every employe, of a 
decent grade in the Tchinn, every major of police, 
has his " one-horse chay." The great have their car- 
riages with two, four, and six horses ; and when you 
consider that it is contrary to St. Petersburgian 
etiquette for a gentleman to drive his own equipage ; 
that the small merchant or tradesman even, rich 
enough to possess a droschky of his own, seldom 
condescends to take the ribbons himself ; and lastly, 
that if not by positive law, at least by commonly 
recognized^ and strictly observed custom, no coach- 
man whatsoever, save those who act as whips to 
foreign ambassadors, are allowed to depart from the 
old Russian costume, you may imagine how numer- 
ous the wearers of the low-crowned hat and caftans 
are in St. Petersburg. 

Here is the portrait of the Ischvostchik in his 
habit as he lives. He is a brawny square-built fel- 
low, with a broad bully-beef face, fair curly hair 



128 

^ A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

cropped round his head in the workhouse-basin fash- 
ion, blue eyes, and a bushy beard. I have seen 
some specimens of carroty whiskers, too, among the 
Ischvostchiks, that would do honour to the bar of 
England. His face is freckled and puckered into 
queer wrinkles, partly by constant exposure to wind 
and weather, torrid heat and iron frost ; partly from 
the immoderate use of his beloved vapour-bath. 
The proverb tells us that there are more ways of 
killing a dog than hanging him — so there are more 
ways of bathing in Russia than the way that we 
occidental people usually bathe — the way leaning 
towards cleanliness, which is next to godliness. I 
cannot divest myself (from what I have seen) of the 
impression that the Russian homme du peuple is con- 
siderably dirtier after taking a bath than previous to 
that ablution. But I am launching into so vast and 
interesting a topic that I must be cautious, and 
must return to the Ischvostchik. 

His hands and feet are of tremendous size ; he is 
strong, active, agile ; and his capacity for endurance 
of hardships is almost incredible. He wears invari- 
ably a long caftan or coat, tight in the waist and 
loose in the skirts, of dark blue or grass green cloth 
or serge, not by any means of coarse materials, and, 
if he be a well-to-do Ischvostchik, edged with two 
narrow rows of black velvet. This garment is 
neither single breasted nor double breasted — it is 
rather back breasted, the right lappel extending ob- 
liquely across the left breast to beneath the armpit. 
Under these arms, too, and again if his Ichvostchik- 
ship be prosperous, he has a row of sugar-loaf but- 



ISCHVOSTCIIIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 133 

tons, sometimes silvery, more frequently coppery, 
but never buttoning anything, and serving no 
earthly purpose that I am aware of. This caftan is 
in winter replaced by the touloupe, or sheepskin 
coat, to which I have previously alluded, and to 
which I give warning I shall have to call attention, 
many a time and oft, in the progress of these pa- 
pers. Under the caftan or touloupe exists, perhaps, 
a shirt, (but that is not by any means to be assumed 
as an invariable fact,) and certainly, suspended by 
a ribbon, a Jittle cross in brass, or a medal of St. 
Nicola'i, St. George, St. Serge, St. Alexander Nevsky, 
or some other equally revered and thoroughly Rus- 
sian saint. " Few sorrows had she of her own — my 
hope, my joy, my Genevieve," and few other gar- 
ments of his own (though he has sorrows enough) 
has my Ischvostchik. A pair of baggy galligaskins, 
blue or pink striped, heavy bucket boots well 
greased, and he is nearly complete. Nay, let me 
not omit one little ornament wherewith he sacrifices 
to the Graces. This is his sash or girdle, which is 
twisted tightly round his waist. It always has been, 
in the beginning, dyed in the brightest and most 
staring hues ; sometimes it has been of gold and 
silver brocade, and silk of scarlet and of blue ; but 
it is most frequently, and when offered to the view 
of you, the fare, encircling the loins of the Isch- 
vostchik, a rag — a mere discoloured rag, greasy, 
dirty, frayed, and crumpled. The Ischvostchik has 
a brass badge with the number of his vehicle, and 
an intolerable quantity of Sclavonic verbiage in re- 
lief ; and this badge is placed on his back, so that 



184 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

you may study it, and make sure of your Ischvost- 
chik, if you have a spite against him. 

This is the Ischvostchik who, with his beard and 
blue coat, his boots and breeches, his once scarlet 
girdle, his brass badge in the wrong place; his di- 
minutive hat (decorated sometimes with buckles, 
sometimes with artificial roses, sometimes with 
medallions of saints) ; his dirt, his wretchedness, 
his picturesqueness, and his utter brutishness ; looks 
like the distempered recollection of a bluecoat boy, 
and the nisfhtmare of a beef-eater, mingled with a 
delirium tremens' hallucination of the Guildhall 
Gog transformed into Japhet in the Noah's Ark. 



VI. 

THE DROSCHKY. 



The Ischvostchik •is not necessarily an adult. 
Though many of the class are men advanced in 
years, with beards quite snowy and venerable to 
look at, (terrible old rogues are these to cheat,) there 
are, on the other hand, numerous droschky-drivers 
who are lads — nay, mere children. It is desperately 
ludicrous to see a brat, some half-score years old, in 
full Ischvostchik accoutrement; for they will not 
bate an inch of the time-honoured costume ; and 
adhere rigidly to the long caftan and the gaudy sash. 



THE DROSCHKT. 135 

As large men's size appears to be the only pattern 
recognized for Ischvostchik boots and hats in Rus- 
sia, the diminutive heads and spare little legs of 
these juvenile drivers are lost in a forest of felt and 
an abyss of boot-leather. I can recall now more 
than one of those little pale, v^eazened, frightened 
faces bonneted in a big hat, precisely like the man 
who is taking his wife's hand in that strange mirror 
picture of John Van Eyck's, in the National Gal- 
lery — the Alpha and Omega of art mechanism, as 
it seems to me ; for if Van Eyck were the inventor 
of oil-painting, he has surely in this dawn-picture 
attained the highest degree of perfection in the 
nicety of manipulation to which that vehicle lends 
itself. 

A plague on John Van Eyck, that he should make 
me unmindful of my Ischvostchik ! I want an ex- 
cuse, too, for returning to him, for I have something 
to say about the vehicle he gains his livelihood by 
driving — ^the Droschky. There is the same amount 
of despairing uncertainty prevalent concerning the 
orthography of this attelage — in plain English, a 
one-horse shay — as about its conductor. In half- 
a-dozen books and prints I find Droschky spelt in 
as many different ways : it appears as Droschka, 
Droski, Drotchki, Droskoi, and Drusschka ; I am 
perfectly ignorant as to the proper method of writ- 
ing the word ; but I have elected Droschky as the 
most generally accepted, and I intend to abide by 
it. 

The real Russian, or Moscow droschky, is simply 
a cloth-covered bench upon clumsy C springs on four 



136 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

wheels, with a little perch in front, which the driver 
bestrides. You, the passenger, may seat yourself 
astride, or sideways, on the bench. It may perhaps 
serve to give a more definite and pictorial idea of 
the droschky, if I describe it as a combination of 
elongated side-saddle, (such as are provided for 
the rising generation, and endured by long-suffering 
donkeys in the vicinity of the Spaniards Tavern at 
Hampstead,) and an Irish outside car. The abomi- 
nable jolting, dirt, and discomfort of the whole crazy 
vehicle, forcibly recall, too, that Hibernian institu- 
tion. There is a leathern paracrotte on either side, 
to prevent the mud from the wheels flying up into 
your face, and the bases of these paracrottes serve 
as steps to mount, and a slight protection in the way 
of footing against your tumbling out of the ram- 
shackle concern into the mud : but the imbecility, or 
malevolence of the droschky-builder has added a tin, 
or pewter covering for this meagre flooring, and as 
your bones are being rattled over the Russian stones, 
your feet keep up an incessant and involuntary 
skating shuffle on this accursed pewter pavement. 
There is nothing to hold on by, save the driver, and 
a sort of saddle-pummel turned the wrong way, at 
the hinder end of the bench ; the droschky rocks 
from side to side, threatening to tip over altogether 
at every moment. You mutter, you pray, you per- 
spire ; your hooked fingers seek little inequalities of 
the bench to grasp at, as Claude Frollo's tried to 
claw at the stone copings when he feU from the tower 
of Notre Dame ; you are jolted, you are bumped, 
you are scarified; you are dislocated; and, all this 



THE DROSCHKT. 137 

while, your feet are keeping up the diabolical goose- 
step on the pewter beneath. Anathema, Maranatha! 
if there be a strong north wind blowing, (Boreas has 
his own way, even in the height of summer, in Pe- 
tersburg,) and your hat be tempted to desert your 
head, and go out on the loose ! There is such a hu- 
man, or perhaps, fiendish perversity in hats, when 
they blow off — such a mean, malignant, cruel, and 
capricious persistence in rolling away, and baffling 
you — that I can scarcely refrain from shaking my 
fist at my vagrant head-covering while I am running 
after it, and swearing at it when I capture it ; and 
punching its head well before I resettle it on my 
own. But what are you to do if your hat flies off 
in a droschky ? You daren't jump out : sudden 
death lies that way. The driver will see you at Ni- 
shi- Novgorod before he will descend to recover it ; 
although he has not the slightest shame in asking 
you to get down to pick up his whip. All you can 
do is to shut your eyes, tie a pocket-handkerchief 
over your head, and buy a new hat ; which, by the 
way, will cost you. for a very ordinary one, ten sil- 
ver roubles — a guinea and a half. As to stopping 
the droschky, getting down, and chasing the fugitive 
— ^that might be done in England ; but not here. It 
seems almost as difficult to pull up a droschky as a 
railway train. The "wheels would seem to be greased 
to such a terrific extent, that they run or jolt on of 
their own accord : and two hundred yards' notice is 
the least you can, in any conscience, give your Isch- 
vostchik, if you want him to " stoi." Meantime, 
with that execrable north wind, where would your 



138 A JOUENEY DUB NORTH. 

hat be ? In the Neva, or half-way to the Lake of 
Ladoga. 

When the Scythians (was it the Scythians, by the 
way ?) were first made acquainted with horses, we 
read that their young men desirous of taking lessons 
in equitation were, to prevent accidents, bound to 
their mettlesome steeds with cords. I think it would 
be expedient, when a foreigner takes his first airing 
in a droschky, to tie him to the bench, or at least to 
nail his coat-tails thereto. The born Russians, curi- 
ously, seem to prefer these perilous vehicles to the 
more comfortable droschkies. They seldom avail 
themselves of the facility of bestriding the narrow 
bench, Colossus like, but sit jauntily sideways, tap- 
ping that deadly pewter with their boot-tips as con- 
fidently and securely as the Amazons who scour 
through the tan at the Hippodrome on bare-backed 
steeds. Ladies, even, frequently patronize these 
breakers on wheels. It is a sight to see their skirts 
spreading their white bosoms to the gale, like ships' 
canvas ; a prettier sight to watch their dainty feet 
pit-a-patting on that pewter of peril I have before 
denounced. When a lady and gentleman mount 
one of these droschkies, and are, I presume, on tol- 
erably brotherly and sisterly terms, it seems to be 
accepted as a piece of cosy etiquette for the lady to 
sit in the gentleman's lap. 

While waiting at a house-door for a fare engaged 
therein, or -at any other time ^hat he is not abso- 
lutely 'compelled to be driving, the Ischvostchik has 
a habit of abandoning the splash-board, and reclin- 
ing at full length on his back on the droschky bench, 



THE DEOSCHKY. 139 

there to snore peacefully, oblivious of slavery, un- 
mindful of the stick. To the full length of his trunk 
would be perhaps a more correct expression, for the 
bench is only long enough for his body down to the 
knees ; and his big-booted legs dangle comfortably 
down among the wheels. He will sleep here, in the 
sun, in the rain, in weather hot and cold ; and, were 
it not for casual passengers and the ever-pursuing 
police soldier, he would so sleep, I believe, till 
Doomsday. There is one inconvenience to the fu- 
ture occupant of the droschky in this; that, inas- 
much as it is pleasant, in a hotel, to have your bed 
warmed, there are differences of opinion as to the 
comfort of having your seat warmed vicariously; 
especially when the animated warming-pan is a 
Russian and an Ischvostchik, and, and — ^well, the 
truth must out — ^ragged, dirty, greasy, and swarming 
with vermin. 

I know that I am sinning grievously against good 
manners in barely hinting at the existence of such 
things ; but I might as well attempt to write a book 
on Venice without mentioning the canals, as to 
chronicle Russian manners and customs without 
touching ever so delicately on the topic of the do- 
mestic animalculae of the empire. There is a little 
animal friendly to man, and signifying, I have been 
given to understand, love, whose existence is very 
properly ignored in the select circles of refined Eng- 
land, but who is as familiar in good society at Pe- 
tersburg as the lively flea is at Pera. It was my for- 
tune, during a portion of my stay in Russia, to 
occupy an apartment in a very grand house on the 



140 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

Nevskoi Perspective, .nearly opposite the cathedral 
of Our Lady of Kasan. The house itself had ah 
ecclesiastical title, being the Dom-Petripavlosko'i, or 
house of St. Peter and St. Paul, and was an ap- 
panage of that wealthy church. We had a marble 
staircase to our house, imitation scagliola columns, 
and panels painted quite beautifully with Cupids 
and Venuses. A Russian lady of high rank occu- 
pied a suite of apartments on the same floor ; and, 
late one night, when I was about retiring to rest, her 
well-born excellency (I used to call her the Queen of 
Sheba, she was so stately) condescended to order her 
body-servant to tap at my door, and tell me that the 
Barynia desired to speak with me. I accordingly had 
an interview with her at the door of her apartment, 
she being also about to retire for the night. She 
had something to show me, she said. Russian ladies 
always have something to show you — a bracelet, a 
caricature, a tame lizard, a musical box, a fly in 
amber, or some novelty of that description — ^but this 
was simply a remarkably handsome black velvet 
mantle, with two falls of rich black lace to it. I 
knew that it was new, and had come home only 
that afternoon from Madame Zoe Falcon's, the 
court modiste in the Mala Millionne ; so, expecting 
that the countess, with the elegant caprice in which 
her distinguished position gave her a right to in- 
dulge, wished to have, even at two o'clock in the 
morning, the opinion of an Anglisky upon her man- 
tle, I said, critically, that it was very pretty ; where- 
upon, a taper finger was pointed to a particular 
spot on the mantle, and a silvery voice said, " Re- 



THE DROSCHKY. 141 

gardez ! " I did regarder, and, on my honour, I 
saw strolling leisurely over the black velvet, gravely, 
but confidently, majestic but unaffected, his white 
top-coat on, his hat on one side, his umbrella under 
his arm, (if I may be permitted to use such meta- 
phorical expressions,) as fine a louse as ever was 
seen in St. Giles's. I bowed and withdrew. 

I must explain that I had previously expressed 
myself as somewhat skeptic to this lady respecting 
the animalcular phenomena of Russia ; for I had 
been stopping in a German hotel at Wassily-Os- 
trow, where the bedrooms were scrupulously clean ; 
and it must be also said that the lady in question, 
though a Russian subject, and married to an officer 
in the guards, had been born and educated in west- 
ern Europe. Had she been a native Russian, little 
account would she have taken of such a true-born 
subject of the" Czar at that late hour, I ween. 

Although the violent and eccentric oscillations of 
a single-bodied droschky undoubtedly conduce to a 
frame of mind which is a sovereign cure for hypo- 
chondriasis, yet the drawbacks to its advantages 
(the last one especially) are so fearful, that I ques- 
tion whether it be worth while to undergo so much 
sufiiering as the transition from a state of chronic 
melancholy to one of raving madness. In the prov- 
inces, I am sorry to write it, it is ofttimes but Hob- 
son's choice — this or none ; but in St. Petersburg 
(and I suppose in coronation time at Moscow) there 
is no lack of double-bodied droschkies, in which you 
may ride without any very imminent danger of a 
dislocation of the arm, and a compound fracture of 



142 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the thigh, or so, per verst. The form of the double- 
bodied droschky, though not very familiar to our 
Long Acre carriage architects, is well known in 
France. The inhabitants of the Hue du Jeu de 
Paume, at Versailles, must be well acquainted with 
it ; for therein it was whilom (and is so still, I hope) 
the custom of the great French painter, Monsieur 
Horace Vernet, to ride in a trim coquettish little 
droschky presented to him by* the Czar Nicholas. 
In his latter days, his imperial friend did not like 
Horace quite so much ; the impudent artist having 
been misguided enough to publish some letters 
which had the misfortune to be true, and not quite 
favourable to the imperial regime. This droschky 
was, it need scarcely be said, a gem of its kind — a 
model Attelage Russe. The horse — ^likewise a, pres- 
ent from the emperor — was a superb coal-black 
etalon of the Ukraine ; and to complete the turn- 
out, the driver was in genuine Ischvostchik costume 
— in hat, boots, and caftan complete. I want to see 
the double-bodied droschky in London, Ischvostchik 
and all. I am tired of tandems, dog-carts, mail- 
phaetons, and hooded cabriolets, with tall horses and 
short tigers. What could there be more spicy down 
the road than a droschky, sparkling, shining, fault- 
less to a nut, a rivet, as our matchless English coach- 
builders only know how to turn out an equipage ; 
with a fast trotting mare in the shafts, and a driver 
with a -bushy beard, a sky-blue caftan, shiny boots, 
and an Ischvostchik's hat ? I think John Coachman 
would not object to growing a beard and wearing a 
caftan for a reasonable advance on his wages. I 



THE DROSCHKY. 143 

wonder if any of the stately English hidalgos I saw 
just before I left Russia — if any of those ethereally- 
born Secretaries of Legation, and unpaid attaches — 
will bring home a droschky from the land of the 
E/Uss, or, on their return, order one from Laurie or 
Houlditch. There are, perhaps, two slight obstacles 
to the naturalization of the droschky in England. 
In the first place, you couldn't have the Ischvostchik 
thrashed if he didn't drive well ; in the next, the 
English gentleman is innately a driving animal. 
He likes to take the ribbons himself, while his groom 
sits beside with folded arms. In Eussia, the case is 
precisely contrary. The Russian moujik is almost 
born a coachman ; at aU events, he begins to drive 
in his tenderest childhood. The Russian gentleman 
scarcely ever touches a pair of reins. The work is 
too hard ; besides, is there not Ivan Ivanovitch to 
take the trouble off our hands ? In St. Petersburg, 
it is entirely contrary to etiquette for a gentleman 
to be seen driving his own equipage ; and I have no 
doubt that any gentleman so sinning would draw 
upon himself a reprimand from the emperor, or, at 
least, the evil eye of the police. This extraordinary 
government seems almost to be jealous of private 
equestrianism. In no capital in Europe do you see 
such a woful paucity of cavaliers as in St. Peters- 
burg.^ I do not speak of the city proper, in which 
the execrable pavement is sufficient to ruin any 
horse's feet; but in the environs, where there are 
good roads, you seldom meet any persons in plain 
clothes on horseback. Either it is not bon-ton to 
ride in mufti (and, to be candid, there are very few 



144 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

gentlemen, save the members of the corps diplo- 
matique, who ever appear out of uniform,) or to 
have a horse to one's self, and to ride it is considered 
in certain quarters an encroachment on the imperial 
prerogative of a cavalry force ; or — and this I am 
led shrewdly to suspect is the real reason — the Rus- 
sians are bad horsemen, and don't care about equi- 
tation when not upon compulsion. Be good enough 
to bear in mind that the Tartars and Cossacks, who 
live almost entirely on horseback, are not Russians. 
The Russian cavalry soldiers sit their horses in the 
clumsiest, painfullest manner you can conceive ; and 
though they have the vastest riding schools, and the 
most awfully severe manege to be found anywhere, 
the Russian cavalry are notoriously inefficient as 
troopers ; they are grenadiers on horseback, nothing 
more. They can do every thing, and more than , 
western soldiers, in the way of manoeuvring, curvet- 
ing, and caracoling, of course— they must do it, or 
the omnipotent Stick will know the reason why ; 
but, in actual warfare, it is astonishing how our 
friend the Cossack goes up to premium, and how 
the dragoon goes down to discount. The peasants 
of Little Russia make tolerably good troopers ; which 
is difficult to understand, seeing that with them 
horses are scarce, and their principal experience in 
riding and driving is confined to oxen ; but the Rus- 
sian proper is almost as much a stranger to a horse's 
back as a man-o'-war's man is, though he, the Rus- 
sian, has a natural genius for droschky-driving. And 
this I write after having seen a review of the Cheva- 
lier Guards, who, if size and magnificence of ap- 



THE DROSCnKY. 145 

pointment are to be considered as a test of capacity, 
are the twelve hundred finest men upon the twelve 
hundred finest horses in the world. 

Now and then — but it is a case of extreme rarity 
of occurrence — you see a Gentilhomme Russe driving 
(himself) a feeble imitation of an English dog-cart, 
in a leafy road on one of the pretty islands in the 
Neva. Every Russian, of whatever rank he may be 
— ^from the sun, moon, and starred general, to the 
filthy moujik ; from the white-headed octogenarian 
to the sallow baby in the nurse's arms — every child 
of the Czar has a worn, pinched, dolorous, uneasy 
expression in his countenance, as if his boots hurt 
him, or as if he had a cankerworm somewhere, or a 
scarlet letter burnt into his breast, like the Eev. Mr. 
Dimsdale. They are not good to look at — Russian 
faces. People say that it is the climate, or the abuse 
of vapour baths, that gives them that unlovely look. 
But a bad climate won't prevent you from looking 
your neighbor in the face ; two vapour baths per 
week won't pull down the corners of your mouth, 
and give you the physiognomy of a convict who 
would like to get into the chaplain's good graces. 
No. It is the Valley of the Shadow of Stick through 
which these men are continually passing, that casts 
this evil hang-dog cloud upon them. Well, imagine 
the Gentilhomme Russe in his dog-cart with four 
reins, no whip, and that rueful visage I have spoken 
of. By his side is a slave-servant, evidently shaved 
against his will, and who is of the same (hirsute) 
opinion still ; for bristles are obstinately starting out 
of forbidden corners. He has a shabby blue cap 

7 



146 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

with a faded gold lace band, and a livery that does 
not come within the wildest possibility of having 
been made for him. He tries mom-nfully to fold his 
arms, with those paws covered with dirty Berlin 
gloves, and he makes superhuman efforts not to fall 
asleep. Master and man are clearly in a wrong 
position. The horse (a first-rate one, with a flowing 
mane and tail) evidently despises the whole conceruj 
and kicks his heels up at it. The dog-cart is badly 
built, the wheels are out of balance, and the paint is 
dingy. They never seem to wash Russian car- 
riages ; I have lived over a mews, and ought to 
know. This Gentilhomme Russe in the dog-cart is 
about as mournful a sight as is to be seen anywhere, 
even in Russia. 

But, when the Russians are sensible enough to 
abandon imitation, and to stand or fall by their own 
native equipages, they can make a brave show. Of 
little, private, double-bodied droschkies, there are 
swarms ; and in some of these you will see horses 
worth from seven to twelve hundred silver roubles 
each. Many a puny cornet in the guards, too, has 
his caliche lined with moir^-antique, and drawn by 
two splendid, black, Ukraine horses. I may observe 
that the horses never wear blinkers, and that, though 
full of mettle, they are very little addicted to shying. 
The harness is quite peculiar and Russian, consist- 
ing of a purple net of leather-work profusely span- 
gled with small discs of silver. Only some of the 
court carriages are drawn by horses harnessed in the 
English manner. Pretty as their own caparisons are 
the Russians sigh for foreign fashions .; and extrava- 



THE DROSCHKY. 147 

gant prices are given for a set of English harness. 
In the native harness there seem to be a good many- 
unnecessary straps and tassels ; but the backs of the 
horses are left almost entirely free, which has a very 
picturesque and wild horse of the prairie sort of 
effect. Coal black is the favourite hue ; next, gray. 
With all horses, the sensible custom is observed of 
.allowing the manes and tails to grow ; and the con- 
sequence is, that the animals look about thrice as 
handsome and as noble (bless their honest hearts !) 
as the be-ratted, be-grayhounded steeds we see at 
home. 

The coachman of the Princess -SchiliapofF, (or any 
other princess you like to find a name for,) the con- 
ductor of those coal-black steeds, (the Schiliapoff has 
twenty-five hundred serfs, and half the Ogurzi Per- 
spective belongs to her,) is own brother to the rag- 
ged, dirty Ischvostchik. Nor, though he is coachman 
to a princess, is his social position one whit better 
than that of Ivan Ivanovitch, sprawling on his back 
on the droschky bench. His caftan is made of su- 
perfine broadcloth, sometimes of velvet, slashed at 
the back and sides with embroidery, as if he had 
been knouted with a golden whip ; his hat is of the 
shiniest nap, has a velvet band, a silver buckle, and 
is decorated with a bunch of rosy ribbons, a bouquet 
of artificial flowers, or a peacock's feather. He has 
a starched white neckcloth, buckskin gloves, rings in 
his ears ; his hair is scrupulously cut, and his beard 
is bushy, well trimmed, oiled, and curled. He has a 
sash radiant with bright colours, and the top of a 
crimson silk shirt just asserts itself above his caftan. 



148 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

It is probable that he sometimes gets meat to eat, 
and that he has decent sleeping accommodation in 
the stables, along with the horses. But he is a 
Slave, body and bones. The Princess SchiliapofF 
may sell him to-morrow if she have a mind. [To those 
who have an idea that Russian serfs cannot be sold 
away from the soil, I beg to recall Mr. Fox's recom- 
mendation to Napoleon Bonaparte on the assassina-. 
tion question, " Put all that nonsense out of your 
head."] The princess may send him to the police, 
and have him beaten like a sack if he take a wrong 
turning, or pull up at the wrong milliner's shop : the 
princess's majordomo may, and does, kick, cuff, and 
pull his hair, whenever he has a mind that way. 
The princess may, if he have offended her beyond 
the power of stick to atone for, send him as an exile 
to Siberia, or into the ranks of the army as a soldier. 
There are many noble families who pride themselves 
on having handsome men as coachmen ; there are 
others, like Sir Roger de Coverley, who like to have 
old men to drive them. I have seen some of this 
latter category, quite patriarchs of the box, venerable, 
snowy-bearded old men, that might have sat for por- 
traits of the Apostles in the Cartoons. It is pleasant, 
is it not, to be six feet high and as handsome as Du- 
nois, and to be sold to pay a gambling debt ? To 
be sixty years of age, and have a white head, and 
grandchildren, and to be scourged with birch rods 
like a schoolboy ? And these good people are 
White, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, — White, 
ma'am ! 

The Russian imperial court is a court ; by which, 



THE DROSCHKY. 149 

on the principle of coals being coals, I mean that 
the Czar has always in his train a vast number of 
grand dignitaries of the household, and bond fide 
courtiers, constantly attendant on and resident with 
him. These courtly personages, when they drive 
about in carriages, are permitted to have a footman 
on the box beside the coachman. This John Thom- 
♦as, or Ivan Thomasovitch, to be strictly Russian, is 
unpowdered and unwhiskered. There is no medium 
in a serf's shaving here ; he is either full-bearded or 
gaol-cropped. His shirt and indeed lower habili- 
ments are doubtful, for he wears — over all, summer 
and winter — a huge cloak descending to his heels, 
of the very brightest scarlet, — a cloak with a deep 
cape and a high collar.* The edges of this garment 
are passemented with broad bands of gold embroi- 
dered with countless double eagles on black velvet, 
and these have such a weird and bat-like, not to say 
demoniac effect, that the Muscovite flunkey clad in 
this flaming garment, and with an immense cocked- 
hat stuck fore and aft on his semi-shaven head, bears 
a fantastic resemblance to an India-house beadle, of 
whom the holy inquisition has fallen foul, and who, 
shorn of his staff, but with his red cloak converted 
into a San Benito, is riding to an auto da fe in his 

* The Russians are extravagantly fond of red. That a thing is 
red, implies with them that it is beautiful ; indeed, they have but 
one word (^preknasse) to express both redness and beauty. The 
favourite Russian flower is the rose ; though, alas ! that has far 
more frequently to be admired in paper or wax than in actual 
existence. A crimson petticoat is the holiday dress of a peasant 
girl : and to have a red shirt is one of the dearest objects of a 
moujik's ambition. 



150 A JOUENEY DUE NOETH. 

master's carriage. Some general officers have soldier- 
footmen, who sit in the rumble of the caleche in the 
military gray cloak and spiked helmet. The ambas- 
sadors have their chasseurs plumed, braided, and 
couteau-de-cliassed ; but, with these exceptions, the 
outward and visible sign of the flunkey is wanting 
in Petersburg. Yet everybody keeps a carriage 
who can afford it ; and many do so who can't. I 
was very nearly having half a private droschky my- 
self ; the temptation was so great, the horses so 
good, the coachman so skilful, the difficulties of 
pedestrianism so great, the public conveyances so 
abominably bad. As I have remarked, the majority 
of carriage-keepers don't take footmen out with 
them. I have seen the great Prince Dolgorould, 
the chief of the gendarmerie and secret police, the 
high and mighty wooden-stick in waiting at whose 
very name I tremble still, step out of one of those 
modest little broughams called " pill-boxes," open it, 
and close the door as if he knew not what a foot- 
man was, and walk up stairs to the second floor of 
a lodging-house, with his stars, his ribbons, his hel- 
met, his sword, his spurs, unflunkeyed and unan- 
nounced. Fall not, however, into the obvious error 
of imagining that Ivan Thomasovitch the flunkey 
lacks in Russian households ; within doors he 
swarms, multiplies himself orientally and indefi- 
nitely ; but, out of doors. Nous Autres do without 
him. 

Two words more, and I have done with the equi- 
pages of the great. Although there are proba.bly no 
people on earth that attach so much importance to 



THE DROSCHKY. 151 

honorific distinctions, caste, costumes, and " sun, 
moon, and stars" decorations as the Russians; their 
carriage-panels are singularly free from the boastful 
imbecilities of that sham heraldry and harlequinad- 
ing patchwork which some of us in the West throw 
like particoloured snufF into the eyes of the world to 
prove our high descent. And, goodness knows, the 
Russian nobility are barbarically well-born enough. 
They have plenty of heraldic kaleidoscope-work at 
home ; but they keep it, like their servants, for grand 
occasions. For ordinary wear, a plain coronet on 
the panel, or — more frequently still-^the simple ini- 
tials of the occupant, are thought sufficient for a 
prince's carriage. 

A last word. Since my return to Western Eu- 
rope I have noticed that the dear and delightful sex 
who share our joys and double our woes — -I mean, 
of course, the Ladies ! — have adopted a new, mar- 
vellous, and most eccentric fashion in wearing- 
apparel. I allude to the cunning machines, of a 
balloon form, composed of crinoline, whalebone, 
and steel — called, I have heard — sousjupes bouffantes, 
and which I conjecture the fair creatures wear un- 
derneath their dresses to give them that swaying, stag- 
gering nether appearance, which is so much admired 
— by milliners — and which I can compare to noth- 
ing so closely as the Great Bell of Bow in a gale of 
wind, and far gone in the dropsy. What have the 
sous jiipes bouffantes to do with the coachmen of the 
Russian boyards ? you will ask. This. For a very 
swell coachman, there is nothing thought more ele- 
gant and distinguished than a most exaggerated 



152 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

bustle. The unhappy wretches are made to waspi- 
cate their waists with their sashes ; and, all around 
in a hundred plaits, extend the skirts of their caf- 
tans. What species of under-garments they wear, 
or what mechanical means they adopt to inflate 
their skirts, I know not ; but they have exactly the 
same Tombola appearance as our fashionable ladies. 
Isn't it charming, ladies ? Only twenty years since, 
you borrowed a fashion from the Hottentot Venus, 
and now skirts are worn a la Moujik JRusse. 

There are some old Russian families who are yet 
sufficiently attached to ancient, pigtail observances, 
as to drive four horses to their carriages. The lead- 
ers are generally a long way ahead ; there is a pre- 
vailing looseness in the way of traces ; and the 
postilion, if any, sternly repudiates the bare idea of 
a jacket with a two-inch tail, and adheres to the 
orthodox caftan ; a portion of whose skirts he tucks 
into his bucket-boots along with his galligaskins. 
Caftan and boots and breeches, breeches, boots, and 
caftan, bushy beard and low-crowned hat! Dear 
reader, how often shall I have to reiterate these 
words — how long will it be before you tire of them ? 
There are sixty-five millions of people in this Val- 
ley of the Drybones ; but they are all alike in their 
degree. The Russian people are printed, and there 
are thousands of impressions of gaudy officers struck 
in colours, gilt and tinselled like Mr. Parks's char- 
acters (those that cost three-and-sixpence) ; and 
there are millions of humble moujiks and ischvost- 
chiks, roughly pulled and hastily daubed — only a 
penny plain and twopence coloured. 



THE czar's highway. 153 



VII. 



THE CZAE'S HIGHWAY. 

" Let me," said somebody who knew what he 
was saying, " write the ballads of a people, and he 
may write their history who will." If the Czar of 
all the Russias would only allow me to make his 
roads for him, the great problem of the way out of 
barbarism in his empire could be solved by a child. 
There is no such civilizer as a good road. With 
even an imperfect highway disappear highway- 
men, crawling beggars, dirty inns and extortionate 
charges, lazy habits, ignorance, and waste lands. 
Our shops, our horses' legs, our boots, our hearts, 
have all benefited by the introduction of Macadam ; 
and the eighteen modern improvements mentioned 
by Sydney Smith can all be traced, directly or indi- 
rectly, to the time when it fortuitously occurred to 
the astute Scotchman (where are his Life and 
Times, in twenty volumes ?) to strew our path with 
pulverized granite. I am convinced that our Ameri- 
can cousins would be much less addicted to bowie- 
kniving, revolvering, expectorating, gin-slinging, and 
cow-hiding the members of their legislature, if they 
would only substitute trim, level, hedge-lined high- 
ways for the vile corduroy roads and railway tracks 
thrown slovenly anyhow, like the clothes of a 
drunken man, across prairies, morasses, half-cleared 
forests, and dried-up watercourses, by means of 

7* 



154 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

which they accomplish their thousand-mile trips in 
search of dollars. "What a dreadful, though delight- 
ful place was Paris when I knew it first ! — foul gut- 
ters rolling their mud-cataracts between rows of 
palaces; suburban roads alternating between dust- 
heaps and sloughs of despond ; and boulevards so 
badly paved, that the out-patienced population were 
continually tearing them up to make barricades 
with. There have been no emeutes in Paris since 
boulevards were macadamized. Much of the Rib- 
bonism, landlord-stalking from behind hedges, and 
Skibbereen starvation of Ireland, may be attributed 
to the baleful roads of bygone days, which were full 
of holes, known as curiosities, and on which the 
milestones were so capriciously distributed, that 
whereas every squire (of the right way of thinking) 
had one on each side of his park-gates, unpopular 
localities, and villages where tithe-proctors dwelt, 
were left without milestones altogether. Who was 
it that was chief of the staff to murderous Major- 
General Mismanagement in the Crimea ? The 
hideous roads from Balaclava to the front. When 
the railway navvy took up the spade, the soldier's 
grave-digger laid his mattock down. W^hat is it 
that impresses us mostly with the grandeur of the 
civilization of that stern, strong people who came to 
Britain with Caesar, but the highways they made, 
whose foundations serve even now for our great 
thoroughfares, and which remain imperishable monu- 
ments of their wisdom and industry — the wonderful 
Koman roads. And flout nor scout me none for 
uttering truisms concerning roads in their relation 



THE czar's highway. 155 

to civilization; for Paris is rapidly surpassing our 
vaunted London City in excellence of pavement. 
New Street, Covent Garden, is in a bad way ; the 
Victoria Road, Kensington, leaves much to be de- 
sired ; and the Commissioners of Turnpike Trusts, 
all over the country, want looking after sharply. 
There is need for us to have sermons on the better 
care of the stones. If we don't keep a bright look- 
out for our pavements, we shall infallibly retrograde 
— decay — as a nation ; and M. Ledru Rollin will 
rejoice. If we are unmindful of the Queen's high- 
way,, we shall inevitably come to clip the Queen's 
English, and break the Queen's peace, and to the 
dark ages. It behoves us especially to be watchful, 
for our protectors never forget to collect the Queen's 
taxes, roads or no roads. 

The Czar's highway, which is literally his — for 
every thing in the empire, movable and immovable, 
animated and inanimated, is his own private and 
personal property * — ^is the worst highway that was 
ever seen. 

The Czar's highway in his two metropolises, in 
his provinces and in his country towns, from north to 
south-^from Karlsgammen, in Lapland, to Saratchi- 
kovskaia, in Astrakhan — ^is the most abominable — 

* I remember once asking a Russian gentleman (not, however, 
with the slightest expectation of receiving a direct answer) the 
amount of the Imperial Civil List. He scarcely seemed to under- 
stand my question at first ; but he replied, eventually, that his 
Majesty " affected to himself" a certain gigantic sum (I foro-et 
how many million silver roubles, for I am boldly bankrupt in 
statistics) ; but " Que voulez-vouz," he added, " avec un Liste 
Civile ? Tout appartient au Czar, ct il prend ce qu'il veut ! " 



156 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

I can't call it a corduroy road, or a kidney-potato 
road, or a sharp-shingle road — the most miserable 
sackcloth-and-ashes road that was ever invented to 
delight self-mortifying pilgrims, to break postilions' 
constitutions, horses' backs, and travellers' hearts. 
There is the iron road, as all men know, from Peters- 
burg to Pawlosky, and also from the northern capital 
to Moscow. This last is kept in order by an Amer- 
ican company, and is a road ; but you understand 
that there can be railways and railways, and even 
out of raUs and sleepers can Czarish men make iron 
roads to scourge, and make a difficult Avernus to 
us, withal. From Petersburg to Warsaw there is a 
chaussee, or road, which, by a fiction as beautiful 
and fantastic as a poem by Mr. Tennyson, is said to 
be macadamized. It is rather O'Adamized; there 
is a great deal more Irish gammon than Scotch 
granite about it ; but it is perpetually being re- 
mended at the express command of the emperor. 
When he travels over it, the highway is, I dare say, 
tolerable; for the autocrat being naturally born to 
have the best of everything, his subjects have an ex- 
traordinary genius for supplying him with the very 
best, and the very best it is for the time being. 
When the Czar is coming, rotting rows of cabins 
change into smiling villages, bare poles into flower- 
ing shrubs, rags into velvet gowns, Polyphemus be- 
comes Narcissus ; blind men see, and lame men 
walk, so to speak. The Czar can turn anything ex- 
cept his satraps' hearts. 

Of the provincial highways, and the vehicles that 
do roil upon them — kibitkas, telegas, and taran- 



THE czar'b highway. 157 

tasses, I shall have to speak hereafter. My object 
in this paper is to give some idea of the pavement 
of St. Petersburg, of which hitherto you have had 
but the glimpse of a notion in the words I have set 
down about ischvostchiks and concerning drosch- 
kies. I have come, by the way, on a new reading 
of the former multi-named individual. The corre- 
spondent of a Belgian newspaper calls him by the 
startling appellation of Ishwoschisky. I am not far 
from thinking that his real name must be Ishmael ; 
for every man's (writing) hand is against him, and 
it is by no means uncommon for his hand to be 
against every man. ^ There is a village in Carelia 
whose sons almost exclusively pursue the ischvost- 
chik calling. There are a good many of them in 
St. Petersburg, where they have a high reputation as 
skilful drivers, and not quite so cheerful a renown 
for being all murderers. 'Gin an ischvostchik of this 
celebrated village meet with a drunken or a sleepy 
fare on a dark night, it is even betting that he will 
give the exact reading of the popular Scotch ditty, 
and make the fare into a " body " before he has long 
been coming through the ride. 

Many persons endeavour to explain the badness 
of the St. Petersburg pavement by the severity of 
the climate, and the treacherous nature of the soil 
on which the city is built. The whole place is, it 
must be confessed, a double-damned Amsterdam ; 
and it has often been with feelings akin to horror 
that I have peeped into a hole on the magnificent 
Nevskoi', when the workmen were mending the 
pavement — -which they are incessantly occupied in 



158 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

doing in some part of the street during the summer 
months. At a distance of perhaps two feet from 
the granite slabs of the footpath, or the hexagonal 
wooden blocks of the roadway, you see the ominous 
rotting of wooden logs and piles on which the whole 
city is built, and at a dreadfully short distance from 
them you see the Water — not so muddy, not so 
slimy, but the real water of the Neva. St. Peters- 
burg has been robbed from the river. Its palaces 
float rather than stand. The Neva, like a haughty 
courtezan, bears the splendid sham upon her breast 
like a scarlet letter, or the costly gift of a lover she 
hates. She revolted in eighteen hundred and twen- 
ty four, she revolted in 'thirty-nine, she revolted in 
'forty-two, and tried to wash the splendid stigma 
away in floods of passionate tears. She will cast it 
away from her some day, utterly and for ever. The 
city is an untenable position now, like Naples. It 
must go some day by the board. Isaac's church and 
Winter Palace ; Peter the Great's hut and Alexan- 
der's monolith will be no more heard of, and will re- 
turn to the Mud, their father, and the Ooze, their 
mother. 

In the Nevskoi" Perspective and the two Morskaias, 
violent efforts have been made for years past, in order 
to procure something like a decent pavement. There 
is a broad foot-way on either side, composed of large 
slabs; but their uncertain foundation causes them 
now to settle one way, now on -the other, now to 
present a series of the most extraordinary angular 
undulations. It is as though you were walking on 
the sloping roofs of houses, which had sunk into the 



THE czar's highway. 159 

boggy soil up to frieze and architrave ; and this de- 
lusion is aggravated by the bornes, or corner-posts, 
set up to prevent carriages encroaching on the foot- 
pavement, which bornes, being little stumps of wood, 
just peering from the earth at every half-dozen yards, 
or so, look like the tops of lamp-posts. But the 
roof-scrambling effect is most impressive during the 
frequent occasions in the summer months, when 
the streets of St. Petersburg are illuminated. Most 
of the birthdays of the members of the Imperial 
family fall between May and August; and each 
scion of the illustrious house of Romanoff has an 
illumination to himself, by right of birth. You, 
who are yet fresh from the graphic and glowing de- 
scription of the coronation illuminations at Moscow, 
by the man who fought the Battle of England in 
the Crimea, better and more bravely than the whole 
brilliant staff who have been decorated with the 
order of the Bath, and who would have gone there, 
for head-shaving purposes, long ago, if people had 
their due — doubtless, expect a very splendid account 
from me of illuminations at St. Petersburg. But it 
was my fortune to see Kussia, not in its gala uni- 
form, with its face washed, and all its orders on: 
but Eussia in its shirt sleeves, (with its caftan off, 
leaving the vexed question of shirts or no shirts in 
abeyance, would perhaps be nearer the mark,) Rus- 
sia at-home, and not expecting visitors till Septem- 
ber — Russia just recovering its breath, raw, bruised, 
exhausted, torn, begrimed from a long and bloody 
conflict. 

The best illuminations, then, that met my gaze, 



160 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

were on the birth-night of the Empress-mother, and 
consisted of an indefinite quantity of earthen pots, 
filled with train-oil, or fat, and furnished with wicks 
of tow. These being set alight were placed in rows 
along the pavement, one to each little wooden post, 
or borne. It was the antediluvian French system 
of lampions, in fact, smelling abominally, smoking 
suffocatingly, but making a brave blaze notwith- 
standing, and, in the almost interminable perspective 
of streets and quays, producing a very curious and 
ghastly effect. At midnight you could walk a hun- 
dred yards on the Nevskoi", without finding a single 
soul abroad to look at the illuminations : at midnight 
it was broad daylight. The windows were all blind 
and headless ; what distant droschkies there may 
have been, made not the thought of a noise on the 
wooden pavement; and these rows of blinking, flar- 
ing grease-pots resting on the earth, led you to fancy 
that you were walking on the roofs of a city of the 
dead, illuminated by corpse-candles. Take no lame 
devil with you, though, good student, when you 
walk these paving-stone house-tops. Bid him un- 
roof, and what will it avail you ? There are no 
genial kitchens beneath, no meat safes before whose 
wire-gauze outworks armies of rats sit down in 
silent, hopeless siege ; no cellars sacred to cats and 
old wine; no dust-bins, where ravens have their 
savings-banks, and invest their little economies 
secretly. There is nothing beneath, but the cold, 
black ooze of the Neva, which refuses to divulge its 
secrets, even to devils — even to the worsest devil of 
all, the police. An eminently secretive river is the 



THE czar's highway. 161 

Neva. Its lips are locked with the ice-key for &Ye 
months. It tells no tales of the dead men that find 
their way into it somehow — even when the frost is 
sharpest, and the ice thickest. Swiftly it carries its 
ugly secrets — swiftly, securely, with its remorseless 
current, to a friend in whom it can confide, and with 
whom it has done business before — the Gulf of Fin- 
land. Only, once a-year, when the ice breaks up, 
the Neva is taken in the fact, and murder will out. 

As for the gas-lamps on the Czar's highway, they 
puzzle a stranger in Russia terribly. There is every 
element of civilization in St. Petersburg, from Soy- 
er's Relish to the magnetic telegraph ; and, of 
course, the Nevskoi and the Morskai'as have their 
gas-lamps. They are handsome erections in bronze, 
real or sham, rich in mouldings and metallic foliage. 
On the quays, the lamp-posts assume a difierent 
form. They are great wooden obelisks, like sentry- 
boxes that have grown too tall, and run to seed, and 
they are barioU, or smeared over in the most eccen- 
tric manner with alternate bars of black and white 
paint. In Western Europe, these inviting spaces 
would be very speedily covered with rainbow-hued 
placards relating to pills and plays and penny-news- 
papers ; but I should like to see the biU-sticker bold 
enough to deface his Imperial Majesty's sentry-box 
lamp-posts, with his sheet of double-crown and his 
paste-brush ! This is no place for the famous Paddy 
Clark, who, being charged before a magistrate at 
Bow Street, with the offence of defacing the august 
walls of Apsley House with a Ueform placard, un- 
blushingly avowed his guilt, and added that he 



162 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

would paste a bill on the Duke of Wellington's 
back, if he were paid for it. I am afraid that Mr. 
Clark would very soon be pasting bills beyond the 
Oural Mountains for the Siberian bears to read, if 
he were alive, and in Russia; or, that, if he escaped 
exile, he would swiftly discover that the Russian 
police have a way of posting bills on the backs of 
human houses very plain and legible to the view. 
They always print, too, in red ink. These black 
and white lamp-posts, common, by the way, all over 
Russia, and whose simple and elegant scheme of 
embellishment is extended to the verst-posts, the 
sentry-boxes, and the custom-house huts at the fron- 
tiers and town-barriers, are an emanation from the 
genius of the beneficent but insane autocrat, Paul 
the First; their peculiar decoration is due to the 
same imperial maniac, who issued oukases concern- 
ing shoe-strings, cocked-hats, and ladies' muffs, and 
whose useful career was prematurely cut short in a 
certain frowning palace at St. Petersburg, of which 
I shall have to tell by and by. When i see these 
variegated erections, I understand what the meaning 
is of the mysterious American striped pig. This 
must have been his colour.* It must in justice be 
admitted, that though Paul was a roaring madman, 

* Did my reader ever notice tlie curious fancy that persons not 
quite riglit in tlieir minds have for stripes and chequers, or at 
least for parallel lines ? Martin van Butchell used to ride a 
striped pony. I saw a lunatic in Hanwell sit for hours counting 
and playing with the railings. Many insane persons are fosci- 
nated by a chess-board : and any one who has ever had a brain 
fever will remember the horrible attractions of a striped wall- 
paper. 



THE CZAR^S HIGHWAY. 163 

there are other countries where the sentry-boxes, at 
least, are similarly smeared. I happened, lately, to 
traverse the whole breadth of the miserable kingdom 
of Hanover, coming from Hamburg ; and for sixty 
miles the road-side walls, palings, and hedges, were 
painted in stripes of black and yellow— the national 
Hanoverian colours. I do not like thee, Hanover, 
thee, thy king, nor coinage. The Hanoverian post- 
man, wear a costume seedily imitative of our Gen- 
eral Post- Office employes; but the scarlet is dingy 
and the black cockade a most miserable mushroom. 
It made me mad to see the letter-boxes, and custom- 
house walls, and railway vans all flourished over 
with the royal initials G. R. exactly in the fat, florid 
characters we have seen too much of at home, and 
surmounted by a bad copy of the English crown. 
I thought we were well rid of the four Georges for 
good and all, and here was a fifth flourishing about 
to vex me. It may be that I looked at Hanover, its 
black and yellow posts, postmen, and king's initials, 
with somev/hat of a jaundiced eye ; for I had to 
stop at Hanover three hours in the dead of night, 
waiting for the express train from Berlin, which was 
behind time, as usual, and crawled into the station 
at last, like an express funeral. There is the worst 
beer at Hanover — the worst cold veal, the worst 

waiter but let me go back to the lamp-posts of 

Petersburg. 

Bronze on the Nevskoi ; striped sentry-boxes on 
the quays ; for second-rate streets, such as the 
Galernaia- Oulitza, or Great Galley Street, the Po- 
dialskeskaia, or Street of the Barbers, more econora- 



464 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ical lamp-posts are provided, being simply great 
gibbets of rough wood, to which oil-lamps are hung 
in chains. There are other streets more remote 
from the centre of civilization, or Nevskoi, which 
are obliged to be contented with ropes slung across 
from house to house, with an oil-lamp dangling in 
the middle (the old E-everbere plan) ; and there are a 
great many outlying streets which do without lamps 
all the year round. But oil, or gas, or neither, all 
the posts in Petersburg are lampless from the first 
of May to the first of August in every year. Dur- 
ing those three months there is, meteorologically 
and officially, no night. It sometimes happens, as 
in this summer last past, that the days draw in 
much earlier than usual. Towards the end of last 
July, it was pitch dark at eight o'clock, p. m. The 
government of the Double Eagle, however, does not 
condescend to notice these aberrations on the part 
of the clerk of the weather. The government night, 
as duly stamped and registered, and sanctified by 
Imperial oukases, does not commence till nine p. m, 
on the first of August ; and then, but not a day or 
hour before, the lamps are lighted. To me, the first 
sign of gas in the Nevskoi', after returning from a 
weary journey, was a beacon of hope and cheerful- 
ness ; but the Russians welcome the gas back with 
dolorous faces and half-suppressed sighs. Gas is 
the precursor of the sleety, rainy, sopping autumn, 
with its fierce gusts of west wind ; gas is the herald, 
the avant'Courier, of the awful winter : of oven-like 
rooms, nose-biting outward temperature, frozen fish, 
frozen meat, frozen tears, frozen every thing. Some 



THE czar's highway. 165 

Russians will tell you that the winter is the only- 
time to enjoy St. Petersburg. Then there are balls, 
then Montagues de Glace, then masquerades, then 
the Italian opera, then sleighing parties, then cham- 
paigne suppers. With warm rooms, and plenty of 
furs, who need mind the winter ? But give a Rus- 
sian a chance of leaving Russia, and see to whom 
he will give the preference, — to the meanest moun- 
tebank at a wooden theatre in Naples, or to Mad- 
emoiselle Bosio at the Balschoi- Theater here. The 
Russians have about the same liking for their winter 
as for their government. Both are very splendid ; 
but it is uncommonly hard lines to bear either ; and 
distance (the greater the better) lends wonderful 
enchantment to the view both of the frozen Neva 
and the frozen despotism. 

A few of the great shops on the Nevskoi and the 
Morskai'as have an economical supply of gas-lamps, 
and there is a restaurant or two so lighted. Oil and 
camphene are, however, the rule, and both are ex- 
tremely cheap ; while, on the other hand, gas is — 
not so much from the scarcity of coal, but from the 
enormous expense of its transit — a very dear article 
of consumption. Some of the second-class shops 
have oil-lamps, with polished tin reflectors ; but in 
the humbler underground chandlery shops, or lavkas, 
I have frequently found the only illumination to con- 
sist of a blazing pine torch, or a junk of well-tarred 
cable, stuck in a sconce. Rude, or altogether want- 
ing in light, as these shops may be, there is always, 
even in the most miserable, a dainty lamp, frequently 
of silver, suspended by silver chains before the image 
of the joss, or saint. 



166 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

In the year 'twenty-four, a French company, after 
an immense amount of petitioning, intriguing, and 
Tchinnovnik-bribing, obtained an authorization from 
the government to light the whole of St. Petersburg 
with gas. They dug conduits into which the water 
broke ; they laid down pipes which the workmen 
stole ; they went so far as to construct a gasometer 
on a very large scale behind the cathedral of Kasan. 
They had lighted some hundred yards of the Nevskoi 
with gas, when a tremendous fire took place at their 
premises, and the gasometer exploded, with great 
havoc of life and property. From 'twenty-four to 
'thirty-nine, a period of fifteen years, not a syllable 
was heard about the formation of a new gas com- 
pany. Public opinion, for once, was stronger than 
bribery ; for the ignorant and superstitious populace 
persisted in declaring that the destruction of the gas- 
ometer was a judgment from Heaven to punish the 
Fransouski-Labarki, the French dogs, for erecting 
their new-fangled and heretical building in the vicin- 
age of our Lady of Kasan's most holy temple. I 
don't think that Siberia and the knout, even, would 
have been very efi[icacious in making the moujiks 
work with a will at building new premises for the 
ofiending pipes and meters. Gas is heretical ; but 
the Russians are slightly more tolerant of some other 
institutions that exist to this day just behind and all 
around the most holy Kasan church, whose immedi- 
ate neighbourhood enjoys an extended reputation as 
being the most infamous with respect to morality in 
St. Petersburg. Strange that it should be the same 
in the shadow of Westminster's twin towers, in the 



THE CZAH'S HIGHWAY. 167 

shameful little dens about the Parvis Notre Dame 
at Paris, in the slums of St. Patrick's, Dublin. 

The new gas company have not done much dur- 
ing the last sixteen years. In the suburbs there is 
scarcely any gas ; and the gas itself is of very infe- 
rior quality, pale and flickering, and grudgingly dealt 
out. I need not say that the lamps are placed as 
high up as possible. The professional thieves would 
extinguish them else, or the Russians would steal 
the gas, — an act of dishonesty that, at first sight, 
seems impossible, but which, when you become 
better acquainted with my Sclavonic friends, — with 
the exquisite art by which they contrive to steal the 
teeth out of your head, and the flannel jacket off 
your body, without your being aware of the sub- 
traction, — ^will appear quite facile and practicable. 
Gas in Russia I I little thought — writing the secrets 
of the Gas in this jom-nal three years ago, and vainly 
thinking that I knew them — that I should ever see 
a Russian or a Russian gas lamp. 

The huge open places, or Ploschads, like stony 
seas, into which the gaunt streets empty themselves, 
are uniformly paved with granitous stones, of which 
the shores of the Gulf of Finland furnish an inex- 
haustible supply. This pavement, if arranged with 
some slight regularity, would be in the early stage 
of progress towards tolerable walking space ; but 
the foundations being utterly rotten, treacherous, 
and quicksandy, the unhappy paving-stones tumble 
about in a stodge of mud and sand ; and the Plos- 
chads are, consequently, almost incessantly under re- 
pair. This is especially the case in the month of April, 



168 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

at the time of the general thaw. Part of the pave- 
ment sinks down, and part is thrown up — the scoriae 
of small mud volcanoes. Thousands of moujiks 
are immediately set to work, but to very little pur- 
pose. The ground does not begin to settle before 
May ; and when I arrived in St. Petersburg, many 
of the streets were, for pedestrians, absolutely im- 
passable. The immense parallel series of -streets at 
Wassili-Ostrov — Linies, as they are called — and 
which are numbered from one to sixteen, as in 
America, were simply bogs, where you might drive, 
or wade, or stride through on stilts, but in which 
pedestrianism was a matter of hopeless impossibility. 
The government, or the municipality, or the police, 
or the Czar, had caused to be constructed along the 
centre of these Linies, gigantic causeways of wooden 
planking, each above a mile in length, perhaps, raised 
some two feet above the level of the mud, and along 
which the dreary processions of Petersburg pedes- 
trians were enabled to pass. This was exceedingly 
commodious, as long as you merely wanted to walk 
for walking sake ; but of course, wherever a per- 
spective intersected the Linie, there was a break in 
the causeway, and then you saw before you, without 
the slightest compromise in the way of step, a yawn- 
ing abyss of multi-coloured mud. Into this you are 
entitled either to leap, and disappear, like Edgar of 
Ravenswood, or to wallow in it a la pig^ or to en- 
deavour to clear it by a hop, step, and a jump. The 
best mode of proceeding, on the whole, is to hail a 
droschky or a moujik, and, like Lord Ullin, offer him, 
not a silver pound, but sundry copper copecks, to 



THE czar's highway. 169 

carry you across the muddy ferry ; and this, again, 
may be obviated by your chartering an ischvostchik's 
vehicle in the first instance, and leaving the cause- 
way to those who like leaping before they look. 

The ground having become a little more solid, the 
pavement might naturally be expected to improve. 
So it does, on the Nevskoi' ; but, in the suburbs, the 
occupant of each house is expected to see to the 
proper state of repair of the pavement immediately 
before his dwelling. As the Russian householder 
is not precisely so much enamoured of his city and 
government as to make of his allotted space of 
street a sort of Tom Tidler's ground, with silver 
roubles and gold imperials, or to pave it with por- 
phyry, Carrara marble, or even plain freestone, he 
ordinarily employs the cheapest and handiest mate- 
rials that his economy or his convenience suggests. 
The result is a most astonishing paving-salad, in 
which flints, shards and pebbles, shingles, potsherds, 
brickbats, mortar, plaster, broken bottles, and pure 
dirt are all amalgamated. The mosaic is original, 
but trying to the temper — destructive to tke boots, 
and agonizing to the corns. 

On the Nevskoi, almost every variety of pavement 
has been successively tried ; but with very indiffer- 
ent success. From Macadam to India-rubber, each 
material has had its day. Asphalte was attempted, 
but failed miserably, cracking in winter and fairly 
melting in summer. Then longitudinal boards were 
laid down on the carriage-ways, in imitation of the. 
plank roads in the suburbs of New York. Finally, 
M. Gourieff introduced the hexagonal wooden pave- 

8 



170 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ment with which, in London, we are all acquainted. 
This, with continuous reparation, answers pretty 
well, taking into consideration that equality of sur- 
face seems utterly unattainable, that the knavish 
contractors supply blocks so rotten as to be worth- 
less a few days after they are put down, and that the 
horses are continually slipping and frequently falling 
on the perilous highway. It is unpleasant, also, to 
be semi-asphyxiated each time you take your walks 
abroad, by the fumes of the infernal pitch-caldrons, 
round which the moujik workmen gather, like 
witches. 

The long and splendid lines of quays (unrivalled 
in magnificence of material, construction, and per- 
spective in the whole world) are paved with really 
noble blocks of Finland granite. It is as melan- 
choly as irritating to see the foul weeds growing at 
the kerbs ; to be obliged to mount to them (they 
are some fourteen inches above the level of the road) 
by a wretched monticule of mud or dust, like a va- 
grant's footway through a broken hedge ; to mark 
how many of the enormous slabs are cracked right 
across ; and how, at every six steps or so, a block has 
settled down below the level, so as to form the bed 
of a pool of foul water into which you splash. 

Any one can comprehend, now, why every street 
in the Czar's gorgeous metropolis is a Via Dolorosa, 
and why there are so many thousand ischvostchiks 
in St. Petersburg. Looking-glass slipperiness in 
winter ; unfordable mud in spring ; simooms of dust 
in summer ; lakes of sloppy horrors in autumn : 
these are the characteristics of the Czar's highway. 



THE czar's highway. 171 

I know impossibilities cannot be accomplished; I 
know the horrible climate can't be mended ; but I 
have hopes of the pavement yet. There is a certain 
portion of the Balchoi Morskaia which has, for 
about ten yards, a perfectly irreproachable pavement. 
The legend runs that the Czar Nicholas, of imper- 
ishable memory, slipped and fell on his august back 
hereabouts some years ago, and that he signified his 
wish to the inhabitants of that part of the Morskaia 
to have the pavement improved, or to know the rea- 
son why. It was improved with electric celerity, 
and it has been a model pavement ever since. I am 
not the Czar Nicholas, nor the Czar Alexander, nor a 
bridge and pavement engineer, nor a contractor for 
paving and lighting. I only point out the wrong, 
and leave it to others to suggest the remedy. But 
until the Czar's highway is improved, both intra and 
extra murosj so long will there be barbarism in the 
very heart of the Venice of the north. When 
Petersburg is well paved, then will the power of the 
stick decay, and the Tchinn no longer steal : but this 
is too much in the Nostradamus style of prophecy. 
When Russia has better roads, let us hope that there 
will be better people to travel on them, your humble 
servant included. 



172 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

VIII. 

GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 

In St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kasan, Odessa, Kieff, 
Wladimir, Smolensk, Novgorod, and Ekjaterinoslaf 
— not only in these, but in every Russian government 
town whose proportions exceed those of a village — 
there is a Gostinno'i-dvor, (literally, T-hings Yard, 
cour aux choses,) or general bazaar, for the sale of 
merchandise and dry provisions. The conquered 
and treaty- acquired provinces — Polish, Swedish, 
German, and Turkish — have their markets and em- 
poria ; but the ' Gostinnoi-dvor is an institution 
thoroughly and purely Russian, and thoroughly 
Asiatic. It will be my province, in papers to come, 
to speak of the Gostinnoi-dvor at Moscow, in which 
the native and humble Russian element is more 
strongly pronounced, and which is a trifle more 
picturesque, and a great deal dirtier, than its sister 
establishment in Petropolis. To the Gostinnoi-dvor, 
then, of St. Petersburg, I devote this paper. It is 
vaster in size, and incomparably more magnificent 
in proportions and contents, than any of its provin- 
cial rivals ; and to me it is much more interesting. 
It is here that you can watch in its fullest develop- 
ment that most marvellous mixture of super-civiliza- 
tion and ultra-barbarism ; of dirt and perfumes ; ac- 
complished, heartless skepticism, and nawe though 
gross superstition ; of prince and beggar ; poodle 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 173 

and bear ; prevailing tyrant and oppressed creature, 
which make St. Petersburg to me one magnificent, 
fantastic volume ; a French translation of the Ara- 
bian Nights, bound in Russia, illustrated with Byzan- 
tine pictures, and compiled by slaves for the amuse- 
ment of masters as luxurious as the old Persians, as 
astute and accomplished as the Greeks, as cruel as 
the E/Omans, as debauched as those who dwelt in 
the Destroyed Cities, and whom it is a sin to 
name. 

In seventeen hundred and fifty, Russia being happy 
under the sway of the benign Czarine Elizabeth — 
the want of a central bazaar being sensibly felt in 
the swelling capital, and nothing existing of the kind 
but a tumble-down row of wooden barracks, as filthy 
as they were inconvenient, hastily run up by con- 
victs and Swedish prisoners in the days of Petri- 
Velike — an enormous edifice of timber was con- 
structed on the banks of the Moika, close to what 
was then called the Green Bridge, but is now known 
as the Polizeiskymost or Pont de Police. This was 
the first Gostinnoi-dvor in St. Petersburg. Five 
years later it incurred the fate of theatres in all parts 
of the world, and of every class of buildings in Rus- 
sia, — ^that species of architectural measles known as 
a fire. It was burnt to the ground, together with a 
great portion of the quarter of the city in which it 
was situated ; and its reerection, in stone, was soon 
after commenced on the spot where it now stands : 
on the left-hand side of the Nevskoi Perspective, and 
about a mile from the chapel-spire of the Admiralty. 
It forms an immense trapezoid, framed between four 



1T4 A JOUIINET DUE NORTH. 

streets. Its two principal facades front the Nevsko'i 
and the Sadovvaia, or Great Garden Street, which 
last intersects the Perspective opposite the Imperial 
Library. The principal facade is one hundred and 
seventy-two sagenes long. There are three archines 
to a sagene, or eighty-four inches ; I think, therefore, 
that I am right, according to CockerofFsky, in saying 
that there is a frontage of twelve hundered and four 
feet, or more than four hundred English yards, to 
the Gostinnoi-dvor. The reconstruction in stone did 
not extend very far. Funds came in too slowly ; or, 
more probably, were spent too quickly by those in- 
trusted with them ; and, for a long time, the rest of 
the bazaar consisted of rows of barracks and booths 
in timber, which were all duly reconsumed by fire 
in seventeen hundred and eighty. The Gostinnoi- 
dvor was then taken in hand by the superb Cather- 
ine, who had a decided genius for solidity and 
durability in architecture ; and under her auspices, 
the great Things Yard assumed the form it now 
presents. Huge as it is, it only forms a part of that 
which the Russians call the Gorod or City of Ba- 
zaars; for immediately adjoining it — inferior in splen- 
dour of structure, but emulous in stores of merchan- 
dise and vigour of traffic, are three other bazaars, — 
the Apraxine-dvor, the Stehoukine-dvor, and the 
Tolkoutchji-rinok, or Great Elbow-market, which 
last is the Rag Fair or Petticoat Lane of St. Peters- 
burg : all the old clothes, and a great proportion of 
the stolen goods, of the capital being there bought 
and sold. 

On the same side of the way as the Gostinno"- 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 175 

dvor on the Nevskoi", and close to the commence- 
ments of its arcades, is the enormous edifice of the 
Douma, or Hotel de Ville. This was originally 
built of wood, but has been gradually repaired and 
enlarged with stone, and has slowly petrified, as 
men's minds are apt to do in this marmorifying 
country. Its heart of oak is now as hard as the 
nether millstone ; and stucco pilasters, and cornices 
in Crim- Tartar Corinthian, together with abundance 
of whitewash and badigeonnement, conceal its primi- 
tive log walls. This huge place (what public build- 
ing in Petersburg is not huge ?) is facetiously sup- 
posed to be the seat of the municipal corporation of St. 
PeterslSurg. There is a civil governor, or Lord Mayor, 
it is true, who is officially of considerably less account 
than the signification of an idiot's tale in the hands 
of M. le General IgnatiefF, the military Governor- 
General of St. Petersburg, without whose written 
authority no person can leave the capital. There is a 
president and six burgomasters, and a Council of Ten 
notable citizens ; but all and every one of them — gov- 
ernors civil and governors military, burgomasters, and 
notables — are members of the celebrated and artistic 
corps of Marionnettes, of whose performances at 
Genoa and at the Adelaide Gallery most people 
must have heard, and who have a theatre on a very 
large scale indeed in Holy Russia. They are beau- 
tifully modelled, dressed with extreme richness, (espe- 
cially as regards stars and crosses,) are wonderfully 
supple in the joints, and have the most astonishing 
internal mechanism for imitating the sounds of the 
human voice. The strings of these meritorious 



176 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

automata are pulled by a gentleman by the name of 
Dolgorouki, who succeeded that eminent performer, 
M. Orloff, as chief of the gendarmerie and High 
Police, and manager (under the rose) of sixty-five 
millions of Marion nettes. So perfectly is he master 
of the strings of .his puppets, and so well is he ac- 
quainted with the departments behind the scenes of 
the Theatre Royal, Russia, that the ostensible lessee 
and manager, Alexander Nicolaievitch, who inherited 
the property from his father, Nicolaialeosandrovitch, 
(an enterprising manager, but too fond of heavy 
melodramas of the startling order,) is said to be 
rather afraid of his stage-manager. A. N. is a mild 
and beneficent middle-aged young man, whose*dram- 
atic predilections are supposed to lean towards 
light vaudevilles and burlettas, making all the char- 
acters happy at the fall of the curtain. He is not 
indisposed either, they say, to many free transla- 
tions from the French and English ; but the stage- 
manager of the Marionnettes won't hear of such a 
thing, and continues to keep the tightest of hands 
over his puppets. The most curious feature in all 
this is, that the stage-manager has himself a mas- 
ter whom he is compelled, no one knows why, to 
obey. 

This master — a slow, cruel, treacherous, dishonest 
tyrant — is never seen, but dwells remote from mortal 
eyes, though not from their miserable ken, like the 
Grand Lama. His — her — its name is System. Lib- 
eral, nay, democratic stage-managers, have been 
known to assume the government of the sixty-five 
million dolls, and forthwith, in their bhnd obedience 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 177 

to system, to become intolerable oppressors, spies, 
and thieves. Things have gone wrong before now 
in the Theatre Royal; and several lessees have died 
of sore throat, of stomachache, of headache, and of 
compression of the oesophagus. But this abomina- 
ble System has lived through all vicissitudes, and 
though immensely old, is as strong and wicked as 
ever.* The old hypocrite gives out occasionally that 
he is about to reform ; but the only way to reform 
that hoary miscreant, is to strangle him at once, and 
outright. Your fingers are not unaccustomed to this 
work, most noble Boyards. 

The only timber yet unshivered of the Douma, is 
the great watchtower, one hundred and fifty feet in 

* A magnificent diamond tahatiere full of snuff has recently 
been thrown into the eyes of Western Europe from the corona- 
tion throne at Moscow. The only real abolition of a grievance, 
in this much -belauded manifesto, is the removal of part of the tax 
on passports to native Russians, who, if they had families, were 
formerly obliged to pay something like four hundred pounds 
a-year to the government while travelling. The political amnesty 
is a cruel farce ; not but that I believe the Emperor Alexander 
to be (though deficient in strength of mind) a sovereign of 
thorough liberal tendencies, and of extreme kindness of heart ; 
but he dares not accomplish a tithe of the reforms he meditates. 
I was speaking one day to an intelligent Russian on this subject, 
(he was a republican and a socialist, but an accomplished gentle- 
man,) who, so far from blaming the Czar for his meagre conces- 
sions to the spirit of the age, made a purely Russian excuse for 
him : " Que voulez-vous ? " he said, " le Tsar lui-meme a peur 
d'etre rosse par la Police Secrete." The idea of the Autocrat of 
all the Russias being deterred from increased liberalism by bodily 
fear of the stick is sufficiently extravagant ; but there is, never- 
theless, a great deal of truth in the locution. 
8* 



178 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

height, which is entirely of sham marble, but real 
wood. There is a curious telegraphic apparatus of 
iron at the summit, and in this work the different 
fire-signals. They are in constant employment. 

I can imagine no better way of conveying a palpa- 
ble notion of things I have seen in this strange land, 
than to institute comparisons between things Rus- 
sian, which my reader will never know, I hope, save 
through the medium of faithful travellers, and things 
familiar to us all in London and Paris. So. If you 
take one avenue of the glorious Palais Royal, say 
that where the goldsmith and jewellers' shops are, 
and with this combine the old colonnade of the 
Regent's Quadrant; if to this you add a dwarfed 
semblance of the Piazza in Covent Garden — espe- 
cially as regards the coffee-stalls at early morning ; 
if you throw in a dash of the Cloisters of West- 
minster Abbey — taking care to Byzantinize all the 
Gothic, but keeping all the chequered effects of 
chiaro-oscuro ; if, still elaborating your work, you 
piece on a fragment of that musty little colonnade 
out of Lower Regent Street, which ought to belong 
to the Italian Opera House, but doesn't, and at 
whose corner Mr. Seguin's library used to be ; if, as 
a final architectural effort, you finish off with a few 
yards of the dark entry in Canterbury Cathedral 
yard, and with as much as you like (there is not 
much) of that particularly grim, ghostly, and mil- 
dewed arcade at the Fields corner of Great Queen. 
Street, Lincoln's Inn : if you make an architectural 
salmagundy of all these ; spice with a flavour of the 
delightful up-and-down, under-the-basement, and 



GOSTINNOI-DVOE. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 179 

over-the-tiles, streets of Chester; garnish with that 
portion of the peristyle of the Palace of the Institute 
in Paris, where the print-stalls are; and serve up 
hot with reminiscences of what old Exeter 'Change 
must have been like ; you will have something of a 
skeleton notion of the outward appearance of the 
Gostinnoi-dvor. * Further to educate the eye, I must 
relate, that round all the pillars there is a long Low- 
ther Arcade broke loose, of toys and small ware; 
that the Palais- Royal-like shops are curiously dove- 
tailed with bits of the Bezesteen at Constantinople ; 
that amongst the diamonds and gold lace there is a 
strong tinge of Holywell Street : to plant the photo- 
graph well in the stereoscope, I must beg my reader 
to endeavour to imagine this London and Paris med- 
ley transplanted to Russia. There is a roaring street 
outside, along which the fierce-horsed and fierce 
driven droschkies fly ; through the interstices of the 
arches, you see, first droschkies, then dust, then pal- 
aces, palaces, palaces, then a blue, blue sky ; within 
a crowd of helmets, gray greatcoats, beards, boots, red 
shirts, sheepskins, sabres, long gray cloaks, pink bon- 
nets, and black velvet mantles, little children in fancy 
bonnets ; nurses in crimson satin, and pearl tiaras ; 
and all this circulating in an atmosphere where the 
Burlington Arcade-like odour of pomatum and hovr 
quet a la reine (for perfumes abound in the Gostinnoi- 
dvor) struggles with that of Russia leather, wax- 
candles, and that one powerful, searching, oleaginous 
smell, which is compounded of Heaven knows what, 
but which is the natural, and to the manor-born, 
smell of the sainted land. Mind, too, that the roofs 



180 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

are vaulted, and that no lamps, save sacred ones, are 
ever allowed to be here lighted ; and that at about 
every interval of ten yards there is a frowning arch- 
way whose crown and spandrils are filled in with 
holy pictures, richly framed in gold and silver, and 
often more richly jewelled. For in this, the special 
home and house of call for commercial roguery, the 
arrangements for the admired Fetish-worship are on 
a very grand and liberal scale. 

A lamp suspended before the picture of a saint is 
supposed to carry an indisputable policy of insur- 
ance with it in its sacred destination; but, votive 
lamps apart, not a light is allowed at any time, 
night or day, in the Gostinnoi-dvor. There are no 
cigar-shops, it need scarcely be said — nor magasins 
for the sale of lucifer-matches. The Russians have 
a peculiar horror of, and yet fondness for, lucifer- 
matches, or spitchki, as they are called. There is a 
popular notion among servants and peasants, that 
they are all contraband, (I never had the slightest 
difficulty in purchasing them openly,) and that their 
sale— except to nobles, of course — is prohibited by 
the government. There are so many things you 
may not do in Russia, that I should not have been 
the least surprised if this had really been the case. 
The Russian matches, I may add, are of the most 
infamous quality — one in about twenty igniting. I 
believe that it is considered rather mauvais ton than 
otherwise if you do not frictionize them on the wall 
to obtain a light. I had a Cossack servant on 
whom, on my departure from Russia, I bestowed a 
large box of wax-taper matches T had brought from 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 181 

Berlin ; and I verily believe that he was more grat- 
ified with the gift than with the few paper roubles 
I gave him in addition. 

As soon as it is dusk the shops of the Gostinno'i- 
dvor are shut and the early-closing movement 
carried into practical operation by hundreds of 
merchants and shopmen. Within a very recent 
period, even, so intense was the dread of some 'fresh 
conflagration that no stove or fireplace, not so much 
as a brazier or chaufferette, was suffered to exist 
within the bazaar. The unfortunate shopkeepers 
wrapped themselves up as well as they could in pe- 
lisses of white wolfskin, (which in winter, forms still 
a distinctive item of their costume ;) and by one 
ingenious spirit there was invented a peculiar casque 
or helmet of rabbit-skin, which had a fur visor but- 
toning over the nose something after the absurd 
manner of the convicts' caps at Pentonville prison. 
Some hundreds of cases of frost-bite having oc- 
curred, however, and a large proportion of the mer- 
chants' showing signs of a tendency to make up for 
the lack of outward heat by the administration of 
inward stimulants, the government stepped in just 
as the consumption of alcohol threatened to make 
spontaneous combustion imminent, and graciously 
allowed stoves in the Gostinnoi-dvor. These are 
only tolerated from the first of November to the first 
of the ensuing April, and are constructed on one 
uniform and ingenious pattern, the invention of 
General AmossofF. Thus remembering all these 
regulation stoves, that no wood has been used in the 
construction of the whole immense fabric — all being 



182 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

stone, brick, and iron, the very doors being lined 
with sheets of the last-named material; and recall- 
ing all the elaborate and severe police regulations 
for guarding the Gostinnoi-dvor against the devouring 
element, I should take it quite as a matter of course, 
were I to hear some fine morning that the pride of 
mercantile Petersburg had been burnt to the ground. 
Man has a way of proposing and Heaven of dispos- 
ing, which .slide in perfectly different grooves. Iron 
curtains for isolation, fireproof basements, and reser- 
voirs on roofs, won't always save buildings from de- 
struction, somehow; and though nothing can be 
more admirable than the precautions against fire 
adopted by the authorities, the merchants of the 
Gostinnoi-dvor have an ugly habit of cowering in 
their back shops, where you may frequently detect 
them in the very act of smoking pipes of ToukofF 
tobacco, up the sleeves of their wolf-skin touloupes, 
or poking charcoal embers into the eternal samovar 
or tea-urn. I have too much respect for the hagiol- 
ogy of the orthodox Greek Church to attribute any 
positive danger from fire to the thousand and one 
sacred grease-pots that swing, kindled from flimsy 
chains in every hole and corner; but, I know that 
were I agent for the Sun Fire Insurance, I would 
grant no policy, or, at all events, pay none, for a 
house in which there was a samovar. Once lighted, 
it is the best tea-urn in the world ; the drawback is, 
that you run a great risk of burning the house down 
before you can warm your samovar properly. 

The shops in the Gostinnoi-dvor are divided into 
lines or rows, as are the booths in John Bunyan's 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 183 

Vanity Fair. There is Silkmercer's Row ; opposite 
to which, on the other side of the street, are Feath- 
er-bed Row and "Watchmakers' Row. Along the 
Nevskoi side extend Cloth -merchants' Row, Haber- 
dashers' Row, and Portmanteau Row, intermingled 
with which are sundry stationers, booksellers, and 
hatters. The side of the trapezoid over against the 
Apraxine-dvor (which runs parallel to the Nevskoi") 
is principally occupied by coppersmiths and trunk- 
makers; the archways are devoted to the stalls of 
toy-merchants and dealers in holy images : while all 
the pillar-standings are occupied by petty chapmen 
and hucksters of articles as cheap as they are mis- 
cellaneous. It is this in-door and out-door selling 
that gives the Gostinnoi-dvor such a quaint resem- 
blance to a Willis's Room Fancy Fair set up in the 
middle of White-chapel High Street. One side of 
the trapezoid I have left unmentioned, and that is 
the long arcade facing the Sadovva'ia, or Great Gar- 
den Street. This is almost exclusively taken up by 
the great Boot Row. 

Every human being is supposed to be a little in- 
sane on some one subject. To the way of watches 
some men's madness lies ; others are cracked about 
religion, government, vegetarianism, perpetual mo- 
tion, economical chimney-sweeping, lead-mines, 
squaring the circle, or the one primeval language. 
Take your soberest, most business-like friend, and run 
carefully over his gamut, and you shall come on the 
note ; sweep the lyre and you shall find one cracked 
chord. I knew a man once — the keenest at driving a 
bargain to be met with out of Mark Lane — who never 



184 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

went mad till two o'clock in the morning, and on 
one topic ; and then he was as mad as a March hare. 
We think that we have such an excellent coinage ; 
but how many a bright-looking shilling is only 
worth elevenpence halfpenny ! We boast of our 
improved beehives ; but how often the buzzing 
honey-makers forsake the hive, and house them- 
selves in our bonnets ! I have a Boswell (every 
writer to the lowliest has his Boswell) who professes 
to have read my printed works ; and according to 
him I am mad on the subject of boots. He declares 
that my pen is as faithful to the boot-tree as the 
needle to the pole ; and that, even as the late Lord 
Byron could not write half-a-dozen stanzas without 
alluding, in some shape or other, to his own lord- 
ship's personal attractions and hopeless misery, so I 
cannot get over fifty lines of printed matter without 
dragging in boots, directly or indirectly, as a topic 
for description or disquisition. It may be so. It is 
certain that I have a great affection for boots, and 
can ride a boot-jack as I would a hobby-horse. 
Often have I speculated philosophically upon old 
boots ; oftener have I ardently desned the possession 
of new ones; and of the little man wants here be- 
low, nor wants long, I cannot call to mind anything 
I have an earnester ambition for than a great many 
pairs of new boots — good boots — nicely blacked, all 
of a row, and all paid for. I have mentioned, and 
admit this boot-weakness, because I feel my soul 
expand, and my ideas grow lucid as I approach the 
great Sapagi-Linie, or Boot Row of the Gostinno'i- 
dvor. 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 185 

The Russians are essentially a booted people. 
The commonalty do not understand shoes at all ; 
and when they have no boots, either go barefooted, 
or else thrust their extremities into atrocious canoes 
of plaited birch-bark. Next to a handsome kakosch- 
nik or tiara headdress, the article 'of costume most 
coveted by a peasant-woman is a pair of full-sized 
men's boots. One of the prettiest young English 
ladies I ever knew used to wear Wellington boots, 
and had a way of tapping their polished sides with 
her parasol-haiidle that well-nigh drove me dis- 
tracted ; but let that pass — a booted Russian female 
is quite another sort of personage. In the streets 
of Petersburg the " sign of the leg " or a huge jack- 
boot with a tremendous spur, all painted the bright- 
est scarlet, is to be found on legions of houses. The 
common soldiers wear mighty boots, as our native 
brigade, after Alma, knew full well ; and if you 
make a morning call on a Russian gentleman, you 
will very probably find him giving audience to his 
bootmaker. 

But the Boot Row of the Gostinnoi-dvor ! Shops 
follow shops, whose loaded shelves display seemingly 
interminable rows of works addressed to the under- 
standing, and bound in the best Russia leather. The 
air is thick and heavy — not exactly with the spicy 
perfumes of Araby the Blest — but with the odour of 
the birch-bark, used in the preparation of the leather. 
Only here can you understand how lamentably ster- 
ile we western nations are in the invention of boots. 
Wellingtons, top-boots. Bluchers, Oxonians, high- 
lows, and patent leather Albert slippers, — name 



18© A JOUENEY DUE NORTH. 

these, and our boot catalogue is very nearly ex- 
hausted ; for, though there are very many other names 
for boots, and cunning tradesmen have even done 
violence to the Latin and Greek languages, joining 
them in unholy alliance to produce monstrous appella- 
tions for new boots ; the articles themselves have 
been but dreary repetitions of the old forms. What 
is the Claviculodidas-tokolon, but an attenuated 
Wellington ? what is even the well-known and estab- 
lished Clarence but a genteel high-low ? 

But, in the Sapagi-Linie you shall find boots of a 
strange fashion, and peculiar to this strange people. 
There are the tall jack-boots, worn till within a few 
months since by the Czar's chevalier guards. They 
are so long, so stern, so rigid, so uncompromising that 
the big boots of our lifeguardsmen would look mere 
stocking-hose to them. They are rigid, creaseless, 
these boots : the eyes, methinks, of James the Second 
would have glistened with pleasure to see them; 
they seem the very boots that gracious tyrant would 
have put a criminal's legs into, and driven wedges 
between. They stand up bodily, boldly on the 
shelves, kicking the walls behind them with their 
long gilt spurs, trampling their wooden resting-place 
beneath their tall heels, pointing their toes menac- 
ingly at the curious stranger. As to polish, they 
are varnished rather than blacked, to such a degree 
of brilliancy, that the Great Unknown immortalized 
by Mr. Warren, might not only shave himself in 
them, but flick the minutest speck of dust out of the 
corner of his eye, by the aid of their mirrored surface. 
These boots are so tall, and strong, and hard, that I 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 187 

believe them to be musket-proof, bomb-proof, Jacobi- 
machine proof, as they say the forts of Cronstadt are. 
If it should ever happen that the chevalier guards 
went forth to battle, (how did all the correspondents 
in the Crimea make the mistake of imagining that 
the Russian guards as guards were sent to Sebas- 
topol?) and that some of those stupendous cava- 
liers were laid low by hostile sabre or deadly bullet, 
those boots, I am sure, would never yield. The 
troopers might fall, but the boots would remain erect 
on the ensanguined field, like trees, scathed indeed, 
by lightning, and encumbered by the wreck of 
branches and foliage, but standing still, firm-rooted 
and defiant. But they will never have the good 
luck to see the tented field, — these boots, — even if 
there be a new war, and the chevaliers be sent to 
fight. The jack-boots have been abolished by the 
Czar Alexander, and trousers with stripes down the 
sides substituted for them. They only exist now in 
reality on the shelves of the Sapagi-Linie, and in the 
imagination of the artists of the illustrated news- 
papers. Those leal men are. true to the jack-boot 
tradition. Each artist writes from Moscow home to 
his particular journal to assure his editor that his 
drawings are the only correct ones, and that he is the 
only correspondent to be depended upon ; and each 
depicts costumes that never existed, or have fallen 
into desuetude long since. Wondrous publications 
are illustrated newspapers ; I saw the other day, in 
a Great Pictorial Journal, some charming little views 
of St. Petersburg in eighteen hundred and fifty six, 
and lo ! they are exact copies of some little views I 



188 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

have of St. Petersburg in eighteen hundred and thir- 
ty-seven. There is one of a bridge from St. Izaack's 
church to Wassily-Ostrow, that has been removed 
these ten years ; but this is an age of go-aheadism, 
and it is not for me to complain. The jack-boots of 
the chevalier guards, however, I will no more admit 
than I will their presence in the Crimea : for wert 
thou not my friend and beloved, Arcadi-Andrievitch? 
count, possesser of serfs, honorary counsellor of the 
college, and cornet in the famous chevalier guards of 
the empress? Four languages didst thou speak, 
Arcadi-Andrievitch, baritone was thy voice, and of 
the school of Tamburini thy vocalization. Not much 
afraid of Leopold de Meyer, need'st thou have been 
on the piano-forte ; expert decorator wert thou of 
ladies' albums ; admirable worker of slippers in gold 
and silver thread ; cunning handicraftsman in wax 
flowers, and dauntless breaker-in of untamed horses. 
In England, Arcadi-Andrievitch, thou wouldst have 
been a smock- faced schoolboy. In precocious Russia 
thou wert honorary counsellor, and had a college 
diploma, a droschki (haras), stud of brood mares, 
and a cornetcy in the Guards. There are hair-dress- 
ers in Russia who will force mustachios on little 
boy's lips (noble little boys), and they have them like 
early peas or hothouse pines ; for everything is to be 
had for silver roubles, even virility. Arcadi-Andrie- 
vitch and I were great friends. He had been for 
soHie months expectant of his cornetcy, and long- 
ing to change his Lyceum cocked-hat, blue frock, 
and toasting-fork-like small sword, for the gorgeous 
equipments of a guardsman. He was becoming 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 189 

melancholy at the delay in receiving his commission ; 
now, fancying that the Czar's aides-de-camp had 
sequestered his petition ; now, that his Majesty him- 
self had a spite against him, and was saying, " No ! 
Arcadi-Andrievitch, you shall not have your cornetcy 
yet awhile ; " now grumbling at the continual doses 
of paper roubles he was compelled to administer to 
the scribes at the War-office and the Etat Major. 
The Russians (the well-born ones) are such liars that 
I had begun to make small bets with myself that 
Arcadi-Andrievitch had been destined by his papa 
for the career of a Tchinovnik,' or government clerk, 
and not for a guardsman at all ; when the youth 
burst into my room one day, in a state of excitement 
so violent as to lead him to commit two grammatical 
errors in the course of half-an-hour's French conver- 
sation, and informed me, that at last he had received 
his commission. I saw it ; the Imperial Prikaz or 
edict, furnished with a double eagle big enough to 
fly away with a baby. Arcadi-Andrievitch was a 
cornet. I am enabled to mention my Russian friends 
by name without incurring the slightest risk of com- 
promising them, or betraying private friendship ; for 
in Russia you do not call a friend BrownofF or 
Smithoffsky, but you address him by his Christian 
name, adding to it the Christian name of his father. 
Thus, Arcadi-Andrievitch, Arcadius the son of An- 
drew. You employ the same locution with a lady : 
always taking care to use her father's baptismal 
name. Thus, Alexandra-Fedrovna, Alexandra the 
daughter of Theodore. 

To return to my Arcadi-Andrievitch. Though he 



190 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

was but a little boy, he possessed, as I have re- 
marked, a droschky; and in this vehicle, a very 
handsome one, with a fast trotter in the shafts, and 
a clever mare, dressee a la vollee, by the side, and 
driven by a flowing bearded moujik, his property, 
(who was like the prophet Jeremiah,) he took me 
home to see his uniforms. The young rogue had 
had them all ready for the last six weeks, and many 
a time, I'll be bound, he had tried them on and ad- 
mired his little figure in the glass, late at night or 
early in the morning. Although this lad had a 
dimpled chin that never had felt the barber's shear 
he had a very big house all to himself, on the Dvort- 
sovaVa Naberejenai'a, or Palace Quay : a mansion 
perhaps as large as Lord John Russell's in Chesham 
Place, and a great deal handsomer. It was his 
house : his Dom ; the land was his, and the horses in 
the stable were his, and the servants in the ante- 
chamber were his, to have and to hold under Heaven 
and the Czar. I forget how many thousand roubles, 
spending money, he had a year, this beardless young 
fellow. I saw his uniforms ; the tunic of white cloth 
and silver ; the cuirass of gold ; the brilliant casque 
surmounted by a flowing white plume ; the massive 
epaulettes, the long silver sash, together with a vast 
supplementary wardrobe of undress frocks and over- 
alls, and the inevitable gray capote. " But where," I 
asked, " are the jack-boots I have so often admired in 
the Sapagi-Linie, and the military costume prints in 
Daziaro's window? " He sighed, and shook his head 
mournfully. The " Gossudar " (the lord) " has abol- 
ished the boots," he answered. " I used to dream of 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 191 

them. I had ordered four pairs — not in the Gostinnoi- 
dvor; for the bootmakers there are soukinsinoi (sons 
of female dogs) — but of my own sabakoutchelovek, 
— of a booter who is a German hound, and lives in 
the Eesurrection Perspective. He brought them 
home on the very day that the boots were sup- 
pressed. He had the impudence to say that he could 
not foresee the intentions of the Imperial Govern- 
ment, and to request me to pay for them ; upon 
which, I believe, Mitophan, my body servant, broke 
two of his teeth — accidentally, of course, in pushing 
him down stairs. He is an excellent bootmaker, and 
one whom I can conscientiously recommend to you, 
and has long since, I have no doubt, put on more 
than the price of my jack-boots and his broken teeth 
to my subsequent bills. — Mais, que voulez-vous? — 
Thus far Arcadi- Andrievitch ; and this is how I came 
to know that the Chevalier Guards no longer wore 
jack -boots. 

I wonder why they were swept away. Sometimes 
I fancy it was because their prestige, as boots, dis- 
appeared with the Czar Nicholas. Like that mon- 
arch, they were tall, stern, rigid, uncompromising ; 
the cloth overalls were more suited to the conciliat- 
ing rule of Alexander the Second. Nicholas, like 
Bombastes, hung his terrible boots to the branch of 
a tree, and defied those who dared displace them to 
meet him face to face. They were displaced, and he 
was met face to face, and the Czar Bombastes died 
in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole, in a certain 
vaulted chamber in the Winter Palace. I have seen 
the tears trickle down the cheeks of the Ischvostchiks 



192 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

passing the window of this chamber, when they have 
pointed upward, and told me that Uncle Nicolai 
died there ; and Nicholas indeed had millions to 
weep for him, — all save his kindred, and his courtiers, 
and those who had felt his wicked iron hand. There 
is a hot wind about the deathbeds of such sovereigns 
that dries up the eyes of those who dwell within 
palaces. 

Far, far away have the jack-boots of the Em- 
press's Guards led me from the Sapagi-Linie of the 
Gostinnoi'-dvor, to which I must, for very shame, 
return. More boots, though. Here are the hessians 
worn by the dashing hussars of Grodno, — hessians 
quite of the E-omeo Coates cut. Now, the jack-boot 
is straight and rigid in its lustrous leather all the 
way down, from mid-thigh to ankle ; whereas to 
your smart hussar, there is allowed the latitude of 
some dozen creases or wrinkles in the boot about 
three inches above the instep, and made with studied 
carelessness. Then the body of the boot goes straight 
swelling up the calf. I doubt not but a wrinkle the 
more or the less on parade would bring a hussar of 
Grodno to grief. These hessians are bound round 
the tops with broad gold lace, and are completed by 
rich bullion tassels. 

Surely it was a spindle-shanked generation that 
gave over wearing hessians ; and a chuckle-headed 
generation that imbecilely persist in covering the 
handsomest part of the boot with hideous trousers. 
To have done with the Gostinno'i-dvor, you have 
here the slight, shapely boots of the militia officer, — 
light and yielding, and somewhat resembling the 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GKEAT BAZAAR. 193 

top-boots of an English jockey, but with the tops of 
scarlet leather in lieu of our sporting ochre ; there 
are the boots worn by the Lesquians of the Imperial 
Escort, curious boots, shelving down at the tops like 
vertical coal-scuttles, and with quaint, concave soles, 
made to fit the coalscoop-like stirrups of those very 
wild horsemen ; and, finally, there are the barbari- 
cally gorgeous boots — or rather, boot-hose — of the 
Circassians of the Guard, — long lustrous half-trews, 
of a sort of chain-mail of leather, the tops and feet 
of embroidered scarlet leather, with garters and an- 
klets of silver fringe and beads, and with long, down- 
ward curved spurs of silver, chased and embossed. 

The theme shall still be boots, for the Sapagi- 
Linie overflows with characteristic boots. Are not 
boots the most distinctive parts and parcels of the 
Russian costume ? and am I not come from Wel- 
lington Street, Strand, London, to the Gostinnoi- 
dvor expressly to chronicle such matters ? Am I 
not in possession of this, a Russian establishment, 
and is it not my task, like an honest broker's man, 
to take a faithful inventory of the sticks ? Here are 
the long boots of TambofF, reaching high up the 
thigh, and all of scarlet leather. These boots have 
a peculiar, and, to me, delightful odour, more of 
myrrh, frankincense, sandal- wood, benzoin, and other 
odoriferents, than of the ordinary birch-bark tanned 
leather. They will serve a double purpose. They 
are impervious to wet ; and (if you don't mind hav- 
ing red legs, like a halberdier or a turkey-cock) are 
excellent things to splash through the mud in ; for 
mud only stains them in a picturesque and having- 
9 



194 ' A JOUKNEY DUE NORTH. 

seen-service sort of way ; and if you hang them to 
dry in your chamber when you return, they will per- 
vade the whole suite of apartments with a balmy, 
breezy scent of new dressing-case and pocket-book, 
combined with pot-pourri in a jar of vieux Sevres, 
pastilles of Damascus, Stamboul tchibouk-sticks, and 
pink billet-doux from a countess. If you like those 
odours gently blended one with the other, you would 
revel in TambofF boots. But perhaps you like the 
odour of roast meat better, and cannot abide the 
smell of any leather. There are as many men as 
many tastes as minds to them, we know. There are 
some that cannot abide a gaping pig; and I have 
heard of people who swooned at the sight of Shap- 
sygar cheese, and became hysterical at the smell of 
garlic. 

Who has not heard of the world-famous Kasan 
boots ? Well ; perhaps not quite world-famous — 
there are, to be sure, a good many things Russian, 
and deservedly celebrated there, which are quite 
unknown beyond the limits of the Empire. At all 
events, the boots of Kasan deserve to be famous all 
over the world ; and I will do my best — though that 
may be but little — to make them known to civilized 
Europe. The Kasan boot supplies the long-sought- 
after and sighed-for desideratum of a slipper that 
will keep on — of a boot that the wearer may lounge 
and kick his legs about in, unmindful of the state 
of his stocking-heels (I do not allude to holes, though 
they will happen in the best regulated bachelor fam- 
ilies, but to darns, which, though tidier, are equally 
distasteful to the sight,) or a boot-slipper, or slipper- 



GOSTINNOI-DVOE. THE GEE AT BAZAAR. 195 

boot, which can be pulled off and on with far greater 
ease than a glove ; which cannot be trodden down 
at heel, and which will last through all sorts of usage 
a most delightfully unreasonable time. The Kasan 
boot is innately Tartar, and the famous Balsagi of 
the Turkish women — loose, hideous, but comfortable 
boots of yellow leather which they pull over their 
papouches when they go a bathing or a bazaaring — 
are evidently borrowed from the Kasan prototype. 
This, to be descriptive after having been (not unduly) 
eulogistic, is a short boot of the high-low pattern, 
usually of dark crimson leather (other colours can 
be had, but red is the favourite with the Russians.) 
There is a cushion-like heel, admirably yielding and 
elastic, and a sole apparently composed of tanned 
brown paper, so slight and soft is it, but which is 
quite tough enough and landworthy enough for any 
lounging purpose. It is lined with blue silk, whose 
only disadvantage is, that if you wear the Kasan 
boot, as most noble Russians do, (without stockings) 
the dye of the silk being rather imperfectly fixed, 
comes off on your flesh, and gives you the appear- 
ance of an ancient indigo-stained Briton. The shin 
and instep of the Kasan boot are made rich and 
rare by the most cunning and fantastic workmanship 
in silver-thread and beadwork, and mosaic and mar- 
queterie, or buhl- work, or inlaying — call it what you 
will — of different-coloured leathers. There is a tinge 
of the Indian mocassin about it, a savour of the car- 
pets of Ispahan, a touch of the dome of St. Mark's, 
Venice ; but a pervading and preponderating flavour 
of this wild-beast-with-his-hide-painted-and-his-claws- 



196 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

gilt country. It isn't Turkish, it isn't Byzantine, it 
isn't Venetian, it isn't Moyenage Bohemian. Why 
or how should it be, indeed, seeing that it is a boot 
from Kasan in Russia ? Yet it has, like the mon- 
strous Gostinnoi-dvor, its most certain dim charac- 
teristics of all the first four mentioned nationalities, 
which all succumb, though, in the long run, to the 
pure barbaric Muscovite element, unchanged and 
unchangeable (for all thy violent veneering, Peter 
Velike) from the days of Rurik and Boris-Goudonof, 
and the false Demitrius. Every rose has a thorn — 
every advantage its drawback ; and the quaint, cosy, 
luxuriant boot of Kasan has one, in the shape of a 
very powerful and remarkably unpleasant odour, of 
which fried candle-grease and a wet day in Ber- 
mondsey would appear to be the chief components. 
Whether the men of Kasan have some secret or 
subtle grease wherewith to render the leather supple, 
and that the disagreeable odour is so inherent to and 
inseparable from it as the nasty taste from that 
precious among medicaments, castor-oil ; or whether 
the Kasan boot smell is simply one of the nine hun- 
dred and twelve distinct Russian stenches, of whose 
naturalization in all the Russias, Euler, Malte-Brun, 
and other savans, scientific and geographical, have 
been unaccountably silent', is uncertain ; but so it is. 
We must accept the Kasan boot as it is, and not 
repine at its powerful odour. Camphor will do 
much ; philosophy more ; acclimatization to Russian 
smells, most of all. 

There is certainly no invention for morning loung- 
ing that can equal this delightful boot. Our com- 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 197 

mon Western slipper is an inelegant, slipshod, 
dangling, prone-to-bursting-at-the-side imposition 
(that I had any chance of obtaining those beauteous 
silk-and-bead slippers thou hast been embroidering 
for the last two years, Oh, Juliana !) There is cer- 
tainly something to be said in favour of the highly- 
arched Turkish papouche. It is very easy to take 
off; but then it is very difficult to keep on ; though, 
for the purpose of correcting an impertinent domestic 
on the mouth, its sharp wooden heel is perhaps un- 
rivalled. There are several men I should like to 
kick, too, with a papouche — its turned-up toe is at 
once contemptuous and pain-inflicting. I have 
heard it said that the very best slippers in the world 
are an old pair of boots, ventilated with corn-valves 
made with a razor ; but the sage who gave utter- 
ance to that opinion, sensible as it is, would change 
his mind if I had bethought myself of bringing him 
home a pair of Kasan boots. I have but one pair, 
of which, at the risk of being thought selfish, I do 
not mean, under any circumstances, to deprive my- 
self. I have but to thrust my foot out of bed in the 
morning, for the Kasan boot to come, as it were of 
its own volition, and nestle to my foot till it has 
coiled itself round it, rather than shod me. I may 
toast the soles of this boot of boots against the walls 
of my stove, (my feet being within, them,) without 
the slightest danger of scorching my flesh or in- 
juring the leather. I might strop a razor on my 
Kasan boot ; in short, I might do as many things 
with it as with the dear old Leather Bottelle in 
the song ; and when it is past its legitimate work 



198 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

it will serve to keep nails in, or tobacco, or such 
small wares. 

The morning equipment of a Russian seigneur is 
never complete without Kasan boots. When you 
pay an early visit to one of these, you will find his 
distinguished Origin reclining on an ottoman, a very 
long Turkish chibouk, filled with the astute M. For- 
tuna's krepky tabaky between his lips, his aristo- 
cratic form enveloped either in a long Caucasian 
caftan of the finest sheepskin, or in a flowered 
Persian dressing-gown, a voluminous pair of charo- 
vars, or loose trousers of black velvet bound round 
his hips with a shawl of crape and gold tissue, while 
a pair of genuine Kasan boots (to follow out the 
approved three-volume novel formula) complete his 
costume. Stay — his Origin's head will be swathed 
in a silk pocket-handkerchief, which sometimes from 
its pattern, and sometimes from its uncleanliness, is 
not quite so picturesque. On a gueridon, or side- 
table, there 'will be a green Yelvet porte-cig'are, a box 
of sweetmeats, a bottle of Bordeaux, a syphon of 
Selzer water, and a half-emptied tumbler of tea, 
looking very muddy and sticky in its glass prism. 
There will be a lap-dog in the room who has been 
taught to understand French, though a Cossack cuir 
by four descents, and who, at the word of command, 
in that language, goes through the military exercise. 
There will be the lap-dog, Mouche, or Brio's, plate 
of macaroons and milk in the corner. There will be, 
very probably, a parrot, perhaps a monkey ; but in 
default of these, certainly a musical box, or a guitar. 
Scattered round his Origin's feet, and on his otto- 



GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 199 

man, will be his Origin's morning light literature : 
Paul de Kock, Charles de Bernard, or Xavier de 
Montepin, their amusing and instructive works : 
[Gentlemen of the old school read Pigault, Lebrun, 
and Ducray-Duminil,] you never see any newspapers. 
His Origin does not care about boring himself with 
the Journal de St. P^tersbourg, or the Gazette de 
1' Academic ; and as for the Times, Punch, the 
Charivari, they are not to be had, even for Nous 
Autres in Russia. You seldom see any Russian 
book, unless his excellency deigns to be a savant. 
What is the good of studying the literature of a 
language which Nous Autres never speak? There 
is a piano in a corner, with a good deal of tobacco- 
ash on the keys. There are some portraits of opera 
girls on the walls, and some more Paris Boulevard 
lithographs too silly to be vicious, though meant to 
be so. If my reader wants to see portraits of Our 
Lady, or of the Czar, he or she must go to Gavrilo- 
Ermova'ievitch, the merchant's house, oY Sophron- 
Pavlytch, the moujik's cabin — not to the mansions 
of Nous Autres, There is about the chamber, either 
in costume, or accoutrement, some slight but unmis- 
takable sign of its owner not always wearing the 
Persian dressing-gown, the charovars, and the Kasan 
boots, but being compelled to wear a sword, a hel- 
met, a gray greatcoat, and a stand-up collar ; and 
there is, besides the parrot, the monkey, and the lap- 
dog, another living thing in some corner or other — 
in the shape of one of his Origin's serfs, who is pot- 
tering about making cigarettes, or puffing at a sam- 
ovar, or polishing a watch-case, silently and slavishly 
as is his duty. 



200 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

IX. 

MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGERS. 

I HAVE heard boots spoken of (not in very polite 
society) by the name of Steppers. I am in a po- 
sition, now, to trace the etymology of the expression. 
Steppers are derived, evidently, from the enormous 
Steppe boots which the merchants in the Sapagi- 
Linie have to sell. Do you know what mudlarks' 
boots are ? I mean such as are worn by the sewer- 
rummagers of Paris,^ which boots cost a hundred 
francs a pair, and of which only three pairs are 
allowed by the municipality per escouade^ or squad 
of mudlarks. Of such are the Steppe boots ; only 
bigger, only thicker, only properer for carrying stores 
and sundries, besides legs, like Sir Hudibras's trunk- 
hose. I don't know if hippopotamus's hide be cheap 
in Russia, or rhinoceros's skin a drug in the market ; 
but of one or other of this class of integuments the 
Steppe boots seem to be made. When they become 
old, the leather forms itself into horny scales and 
bony ridges ; the thread they are sown with may 
turn into wire ; the soles become impregnated with 
flinty particles, and calcined atoms of loamy soil, 
and so concrete, and more durable ; but, as for wear- 
ing away on the outside, you never catch the Steppe 
boots doing that. They are not altogether exempt 
from decay, either, these Blunderborean boots ; and, 
like Dead Sea apples, are frequently rotten within, 



MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGERS. 201 

while their exterior is stout and fair to look upon ; 
for they are lined throughout (and an admirably 
warm and comfortable lining it makes) with sheep- 
skin, dressed to a silky state of softness, and curried 
into little spherical tufts, like the wool on a blacka- 
moor's head with whom the great difficulty of ages 
has been overcome, and who has been washed white. 
For ornament's sake, the sheepskin is superseded 
round the tops by bands of rabbit or miniver skin ; 
and there is a complicated apparatus of straps, 
buckles, and strings, to keep the boots at due mid- 
thigh height. But there is a profligate insect called 
the moth, — a gay, fluttering, volatile, reckless scape- 
grace, always burning candles at both ends, and 
burning his own silly fingers in the long run, who 
has an irrepressible penchant for obtaining board 
and lodging gratis in the woolly recesses of the 
sheepskin lining. Here* he lives with several other 
prodigals, his relatives, in the most riotous and 
wasteful fashion — living on the fat, or rather, the 
wool of the land, and most ungratefully devouring 
the very roof that covers him. He sneezes at cam- 
phor, and defies dusting ; and he and his crew would 
very speedily devour every atom of your boot-linings, 
but for the agency of a very powerful and, to moth, 
deadly substance, called mahorka. Mahorka is the 
very strongest, coarsest,' essential-oiliest tobacco im- 
aginable. It smells — ye gods, how it smells! It 
smokes as though it were made of the ashes of the 
bottomless pit, mingled with the leaves of the upas- 
tree, seasoned with assafcetida and cocculus indicus. 
It is, altogether, about the sort of tobacco against 
9* 



202 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

which James the First might have written his Coun- 
terblast, and a pipe of which he might have offered 
the devilj as a digester to his proposed repast of a 
pig, and a poll of ling, with mustard. This mahorka 
(the only tobacco the common people care about 
smoking) is, by Pavel or Dmitrych, your servants, 
rubbed periodically into the lining of your boots, 
(and into your schooba, too, and whatever other 
articles of furriery you may happen to possess,) 
causing the silly moth to fly away — if, indeed, it 
leave him any wings to fly, or body to fly away 
with. It kills all insects, and it nearly kills you, 
if you incautiously approach too closely to a newly- 
mahorka'd boot. Pavel and Dmitrych, too, are pro- 
vokingly addicted to dropping the abominable stuff 
about, and rubbing it into dress-coats and moire- 
antique waistcoats, not only irrevocably spoiling 
those garments, but producing the same sternuta- 
tory effects on your olfactory nerves, as though 
somebody had been burning a warming-pan full of 
cayenne pepper in your apartment. All things 
admitted, however, mahorka is a sovereign specific 
against moths. 

Every social observance in Russia is tranche — 
peculiar to one of the two great classes : it is a 
noble's custom, or a tooujik's custom, but is never 
common to both. Russian gentlemen, within doors, 
are incessant smokers ; the common people use very 
little tobacco. You never see a moujik smoking a 
cigar, and very rarely even enjoying his pipe. In 
some of the low vodki shops I have seen a group 
of moujiks with one blackened pipe among them, 



MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGERS. 203 

with a shattered bowl and scarcely any stem, 
charged with this same miahorka. The pipe was 
passed from hand to hand, each smoker taking a 
solemn whifF, and giving a placid grunt, exactly as 
you may see a party of Irish bogtrotters doing in 
a Connemara shebeen. Down south in Russia — 
I mean in the governments of Koursk and Woron- 
esch — there is a more Oriental fashion of smoking 
in vogue. Some mahorka, with more or less dirt, 
is put into a pipkin, in whose sides a few odd holes 
have been knocked ; and the smokers crouch over it 
with hollow sticks, reeds, or tin tubes, each man to 
a hole, and puff away at the common bowl. It is 
not that the Russian peasant does not care for his 
pipe ; but he has an uneasy consciousness that the 
luxurious narcotic is not for the likes of him. For 
him to fill the pipe of his lord and master, and roll 
the paper cigarettes ; that should surely be sufficient. 
Havn't our British matrons somewhat similar feel- 
ings concerning their housemaids' ringlets ? 

This powerful mahorka is powerless against the 
Russian bug. That hateful brown-uniformed mon- 
ster, who is voracious, blood-sucking, impudent, and 
evil-smelling enough to be a Russian functionary, 
and to have a grade in the Tchinn, laughs a horse- 
leech laugh at mahorka. He would smoke a pipe 
thereof without winking, I am convinced. I knew 
a lady in St. Petersburg whose sleeping apartment 
(hung with sky-blue silk, fluted, and forming one of 
a suite rented at two hundred roubles a month) was 
so infested with arch bugs, that she would have 
gone into a high fever for want of rest, if febrile 



204 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

symptoms had not been counteracted by faintness 
with loss of blood. She was a buxom woman orig- 
inally, and grew paler and paler every day. She 
tried camphor ; she tried vinegar ; she tried turpen- 
tine ; she tried a celebrated vermin annihilator pow- 
der, which had been given to her by my friend 
Nessim Bey, (otherwise Colonel Washington La- 
fayette Bowie, U. S.,) and which had been used 
with great success by that gallant condottiere while 
campaigning against the bugs — and the Russians^ — 
with Omer Pasha in Anatolia. But all was in vain. 
The brown vampires rioted on, that fair flesh, and 
brought all their brothers, like American sight-seers. 
The lady was in despair, and applied, at last, to a 
venerable Russian friend, decorated with the cross 
of St. Stanislas, second class, high up in the minis- 
try of imperial appanages, and who had resided for 
more than half a century in St. Petersburg. 

" How can you kill bugs, general ? " (of course he 
was a general) she asked. 

" Madame," he answered, " I think it might be 
done with dogs and a double-barrelled gu« ! " 

This, though hyperbolical, is really the dernier mot 
of the vermin philosophy. If you want to destroy 
bugs, you must either go to bed in plate-armour, 
and so, rolling about, squash them, or you must sit 
up patiently with a moderator-lamp, a cigar, and a 
glass of grog, and hunt them. You will be a mighty 
hunter before the morning. Don't be sanguine 
enough to imagine that you can kill the wretches 
with the mere finger and thumb. I have found a 
pair of snuffers serviceable in crushing their lives 



MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGEKS. 205 

out. A brass wafer-stamp (if you have a strong 
arm and a sure aim) is not a bad thing to be down 
on them with ; I have heard a noose, or lasso of 
packthread, to snare and strangle them unawares, 
spoken of favourably ; but a hammer, and a ripping- 
chisel of the pattern used by the late Mr. Manning, 
are the best vermin annihilators ! I think the Rus- 
sian government ought to give a premium for every 
head of bugs brought to the chief police-office, as 
our Saxon kings used to do for wolves. Only I 
don't think the imperig-l revenue would quite suffice 
for the first week's premium — were it but the tenth 
part of a copeck per cent. 

The subject of vermin always raises my ire, even 
when I fall across it accidentally. I have been so 
bitten! We can pardon a cripple for denouncing 
the vicious system of swaddling babies; and who 
could be angry with Titus Oates for declaiming 
against the iniquity of corporal punishment ? 

Unless I have made up my mind to take lodgings 
in the Boot Row of the Gostinnoi-dvor — which as 
there are no dwelling-rooms there, would be but a 
cold-ground lodging — it is very nearly time for me, 
I opine, to leave off glozing over boots, and go else- 
where. But I could write a quarto about them. 
Once more, however, like the thief at Tyburn, trav- 
ersing the cart, oftep taking leave, because loth to 
depart, I must claim a fresh, though brief reprieve ; 
for see I here are the children's boots ; and you who 
love the little people must come with me, and gaze. 

Such boot- vines ! — such espaliers of shoes ! such 
pendant clusters of the dearest, tottiest, nattiest, 



206 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

gaudiest, miniatures of grown-men's boots, all in- 
tended for young Russia! Field- Marshals' boots, 
Chevalier Guards' boots, steppe boots, courier boots, 
cossack boots, Lesquian boots, Kasan boots, but all 
fitted to the puddy feet of the civil and military func- 
tionaries of the empire of Lilliput. Long live the 
Czar Tomas Thumbovitch, second of the name ! 
And all the boots are picturesque ; for the Russians 
have a delightful custom of dressing their little chil- 
dren, either in the quaint old Muscovite costume, or 
in the dress of some tributary, or conquered, or me- 
diatized nation. One of the Nous Autres adult, 
must wear, perforce, either some choking uniform, 
or else a suit from Jencens on the Nevskoi", and of 
the latest Parisian cut ; but, as a little boy- — from 
four to eight years old say, (for, after that, he be- 
comes a cadet, and is duly choked in a military uni- 
form, and bonneted with a military headdress,) he 
wears the charming costume of a little Pole, or a 
Circassian, or a Lesquian, or a Mongol, or a Kirghiz, 
or a Cossack of the Don, the Wolga, the Oural, 
the Ukraine, or the Taurida. Nothing prettier than 
to see these dumpy little Moscovs toddling along 
with their mammas, or their nurses, in the verdant 
alleys of the Summer Garden ; huge, flattened- 
pumpkin shaped Cossack turban-caps, or Tartar 
tarbouches, or Volhynian Schliapas, or Armenian 
calpacks on their heads ; their tiny bodies arrayed 
in costly little caftans, some of Persian silk stiff 
with embroidery, some of velvet, some of the soft 
Circassian camel and goat-hair fabrics, some of cloth 
of gold, or silver; with splendiferous little sashes, 



MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGEES. 207 

and jewelled cartouch-cases on their breasts, and 
sparkling yataghans, and three-hilted poniards (like 
Celtic dirks) ; and the multi-coloured little boots you 
see in the Gostinnoi-dvor, made of scarlet, yellow, 
sky-blue, black-topped-with-red, and sometimes white 
leather, which last, with a little pair of gilt spurs, are 
really delectable to look upon. As the children be- 
come older, these pretty dresses are thrown aside, 
and the boys become slaves, (thrice noble and slave- 
possessing though they be,) and are ticketted, and 
numbered, and registered, and drilled, and taught 
many languages, and not one honest or ennobling 
thing; for the greater glory of God, and our Lord 
the Czar. Would you quarrel with me for liking 
children in fancy dresses ? In truth, I love to see 
them as fantastically-gayly dressed as silk, and vel- 
vet, and gay colours, and artistic taste can make 
them. Never mind the crosspatches who sneer 
about us in England, and say our children look 
like little Highland kilt-stalkers, and little ballet- 
girls. I would rather that, than that they should 
look like little Quakers, or little tailors, or little 
bankers, or little beneficed clergymen, or little don- 
keys, which last-named is the similitude assumed 
by the asinine jacket, trousers, frill, and round hat. 
Dress up the children like the characters in the story- 
books. They don't belong to our world yet ; they 
are our living story-books in themselves, the only 
links we have between those glorious castles in the 
air and these grim banks, talking-shops, and union 
workhouses, on earth, here. I regret that the Rus- 
sians do not oftener extend their picturesque choice 



208 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

of wardrobe to the little girls. Now and again, but 
very, very rarely, I have seen some infant Gossuda- 
rinia — some little lady of six or eight summers — 
dressed in the long, straight, wide-sleeved farthin- 
gale, the velvet and jewelled kakoschnik . like the 
paipted aureole of a Byzantine saint, the long lace 
veil, the broad girdle tied in an X knot at the stom- 
acher, and the embroidered slippers with golden 
heels, which still form the costume de cour of the 
Russian ladies ; but in too many instances the per- 
nicious influence of Mesdames Zoe Falcon and 
Jessie Field, Marchandes des Modes, have been pre- 
dominant ; and the little girls are dressed after the 
execrable engravings in the fashion-books, in flimsy 
gauze and artificial flower bonnets, many-fringed 
mantelettes, many-flounced skirts, lace-edged panta- 
lettes, open-work stockings, (pink silk, of course!) 
and bronzed-kid bottines. I mind the time when 
little girls at home used to be dressed prettily, 
quaintly, like little gipsies or little Swiss shepherd- 
esses ; but I shudder for the day now when, return- 
ing to England, I shall see small Venuses swaying 
down Regent Street with iron-hooped petticoats, 
and decapitated sugar-loaf-like Talmas, and bird- 
cage bonnets half off their little heads. Why not 
have the paniers — ^the real hoops — back, ladies, at 
once: the red-headed mules, patches, hair-powder, 
and all the rest of the Louis Quinze Wardour- 
Street shoppery, not forgetting the petite soupers, 
and the Abbes, and the Madelonnettes, and the 
Pare aux Cerfs ? Be consistent. You borrow your 
hoops from the French ladies' great grandmothers — 



MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGEES. 209 

are there no traditions of their morals to be imported, 
as good as new, in this year fifty-six ? 

To reform female costume is far beyond my pow-' 
ers. Much might be done, perhaps, by administer- 
ing forty blows with a stick to every male worker in 
metals convicted of forging steel sous-jupes, and by 
sentencing every female constructor of a birdcage 
bonnet to learn by heart the names and addresses of 
all the petitioners against Sunday park bands. Still 
I am moved by a humble ambition to introduce a 
new little-boy costume into my native country. 
Very many of the Russian gentry dress their chil- 
dren in the exact costume (in miniature) of our old 
friend the Ischvostchik, and few dresses, certainly, 
could be so picturesque, so quaint, and so thorough- 
ly Russian. There is a small nephew of mine some- 
where on the southern English coast, and whom 
(supposing him to have surmounted that last jam- 
pot difficulty by this time) I intend, with his parents' 
permission, to dress in this identical Ischvostchik's 
costume. I see, in my mind's eye, that young Chris- 
tian walking down the High Street, the pride of his 
papa and mamma, clad in a gala costume of Mus- 
covite fashioning — a black velvet caftan with silver 
sugar-loaf buttons, and an edging of braid ; a regu- 
lar-built Ischvostchik's hat with a peacock's feather ; 
baggy little breeches of the bed-ticking design ; and 
little boots with scarlet tops ! Bran new from the 
Gostinnoi-dvor have I the hats and boots. The cus- 
tom-house officers of four nt^tions have already ex- 
amined and admired them, and — doubtless in their 
tenderness for little boys — have allowed them to pass 



210 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

duty free. There only remain the stern-faced men 
in the shabby coats at the Dover Douane, to turn 
my trunks into a Hampton Court maze, and I shall 
be able to bring those articles of apparel safely to 
the desired haven. Who knows but I may intro- 
duce a new fashion among the youth of this land ; 
that the apothecary, the lawyer, nay, the great may- 
or's wife of Bevistown, may condescend eventually 
to array her offspring after the fashion I set ! Lord 
Petersham had his coat. Count D'Orsay his hat, 
Blucher his boot, Hobson his choice, Howqua his 
mixture, Bradshaw his guide. Daffy his elixir, and 
Sir John Cutler his stockings, — why may not I 
aspire to day when in the cheap tailors' windows 
I may see a diminutive waxen figure arrayed in the 
Ischvostchik's costume I have imported and made 
popular ? 

Some of these little children's boots are quite 
marvels in the way of gold and silver embroidery. 
The Russians are nearly as skilful in this branch of 
industry as the Beguines of Flanders ; and since 
the general confiscation of ecclesiastical property by 
Catherine the Second (who certainly adhered to the 
totoporcine principle in a right imperial manner,) 
there have been many convents in the interior of 
Russia which have been self-supporting, and have 
even acquired ample revenues, through the skill of 
the nuns and the orphan girls whom they receive as 
inmates, in embroidery. Du reste, Russians as a 
nation are adepts in elaborate handiwork — imitative 
only, be it well understood. You must set them to 
work by pattern, for of invention they are compara- 



MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGERS. 211 

tively barren ; but whether the thing to be imitated 
be a miniature by Isabey or an Aubusson carpet, a 
Limerick glove or a Napier's steam-engine, a Sevres 
vase or a Grecian column, an Enfield rifle or a chro- 
nometer by Mr. John Bennett of Gheapside, they 
will turn you out a copy, so close, so faithfully fol- 
lowed in its minutest details, that you will have con- 
siderable difficulty in distinguishing the original from 
the duplicate. There is an immense leaven of the 
Chinese Tartar in the Tartar-Russian. The small 
eyes, the high cheek-bone, sallow complexions and 
nervous gesticulation, I will not insist upon ; the 
similarities are so ethnologically obvious.* But 
there are many more points of resemblance between 
the Russians and the Chinese. Both people are ha- 
bitually false and thievish, both are faithless in di- 
plomacy, bragging in success, mendacious in defeat, 
cruel and despotic always. Both nations are jealous 
of, and loathe, yet imitate, the manners and customs 
of strangers ; both have an exaggerated and idola- 
trous emperor-worship, and Joss-worship ; both are 
passionately addicted to tea, fireworks, graven ima- 
ges, and the use of the stick as a penal remedy. 
Both have enormous armies on paper, and tremen- 
dous fleets ia harbour, and forts impregnable (till 
they are taken, after which misadventure they turn 
up to have been nothing but mere blockhouses ;) 
both nations are slaves to a fatiguing and silly eti- 
quette ; both are outwardly polite and inwardly bar- 
barous ; both are irreclaimably wedded to a fidgetty, 

* It sLoukl be taken into consideration that of ethnology, as a 
science, 1 am totally ignorant. 



212 A JOUENEY DUB NORTH. 

elaborately-clumsy system of centralization — boards 
of punishments, boards of rewards, boards of digni- 
ties. Both, in organization, are intensely literary 
and academical, and in actuality, grossly ignorant. 
The Chinese have the mandarin class system ; the 
Russians have the Tchinn with its fourteen grades 
— both bureaucratic pyramids, stupendous and rot- 
ten. The Chinese bamboo their wives ; the Rus- 
sians bamboo their wives (" And so do the English," 
I hear a critic say : but neither Russian nor Chinese 
incurs the risk of six months at the treadmill for so 
maltreating his spouse.) In both empires there is 
the same homogeneous nullity on the part of the 
common people — I mean forty millions or so feeding 
and fighting and being oppressed and beaten like 
One, without turning a hair in the scale of political 
power ; and — here I bring my parallel triumphantly 
to a close — both nations possess a language which, 
though utterly and radically dissimilar, are both co- 
pious, both written in incomprehensible characters, 
both as arbitrary in orthography and pronunciation 
as their emperors are arbitrary in power, and both 
difficult, if not impossible, of perfect acquisition by 
western Europeans. I declare, as an honest travel- 
er, holding up my hand in the court of criticism, and 
desirous of being tried by Lord Chief Justice Aris- 
tarchus and my country, that I never passed a week 
in Russia without thinking vividly of what I had 
read about the Celestial Empire ; that it was impos- 
sible to read the list of nominations, promotions, 
preferments, and decorations in the Pekin — I beg 
pardon — I mean the St. Petersburg — Gazette, with- 



MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGERS. 213 

out thinking of the mandarins, and the peacocks' 
feathers, and the blue buttons, and the yellow gir- 
dles ; that the frequent application of the stick was 
wonderfully like the rice-paper representations of the 
administration of the bamboo ; that the " let it be 
so " at the end of an oukase of the Russian Czar, 
struck me as being own rhetorical brother to the 
" respect this " which terminates the yellow-poster 
proclamations of the Chinese emperor. 

I must do the Russians the justice to admit that 
they do not attempt to tell the time of day by the 
cat's eyes ; and that, though arrant boasters, they 
are not the miserable cowards the Chinese are. As 
a people, and collectively, the Russians are brave in 
the highest degree ; but it is in their imitative skill 
that the Russians, while they excel, so strongly 
resemble their Mantchou Tartar cousins. They 
have, it is true, a sufficient consciousness of the 
fitness of things to avoid falling into the absurd 
errors to which the Chinese, from their slavish adhe- 
rence to a given pattern, are liable. They do not, 
if a cracked but mended tea-cup be sent them as a 
model, send home an entire tea-service duly cracked 
and mended with little brass clamps ; they do not 
make half-a-dozen pair of nankeen pantaloons, each 
with a black patch in the seat, because the originals 
had been so repaired; neither do they carefully 
scrape the nap off a new dress-coat at the seams, in 
faithful imitation of the threadbare model ; but, 
whatever you choose to set ^before a Russian, from 
millinery to murder, from architecture to arsenic, 
that will he produce in duplicate with the most 



214 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

wonderful skill and fidelity. There is, to be sure, 
always something wanting in these wondrous Rus- 
sian copies. In their pictures, their Corinthian col- 
umns, their Versailles fountains, their operas, their 
lace bonnets, there is an indefinable soupgon of can- 
dle-grease and bears' hides, and the North Pole, and 
the man with the bushy beard who had to work at 
these fine things for nothing — because he was a 
slave. Can you imagine a wedding trousseau, all 
daintily displayed — all satin, gauze, orange flowers, 
Brussels lace, and pink rosettes — which had been 
clumsily handled by some Boy Jones ? Imagine 
the marks of thumbs and greasy sooty fingers dimly 
disfiguring the rich textures I That, to me, is Rus- 
sian civilization. 



X. 

THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 

This is the Sloboda, or village, say of Volnoi- 
Voloschtchok, and there are five hundred villages like 
it. Still you are to know that Volnoi-Voloschtchok 
is some twenty-imperial versts from the government 
town of Rjew, in the government of Twer, and as 
all men should know, about half-way to Mocow the 
Holy ; the StaraV, or old town, as the Russians lov- 
ingly term it, and which holds the nearest place in 
their affections to KiefF the Holiestj which they call 
the mother of Russian cities. This, then, is the 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 215 

seigneural sloboda of Volnoi, (as we will conclude 
to call it, for shortness ;) and you are now to hear 
all about it, and its lord and master. 

I have come from Twer on the Volga, on what, 
in Bohemian euphuism, is known as the Grand 
Scud. This, though difficult of exact translation, 
may be accepted as implying a sort of purposeless 
journeying — a viatorial meandering — a pilgrimage 
to the shrine of our Lady of Haphazard — an expe- 
dition in which charts, compasses, and chronometers 
have been left behind as needless impediments, and 
in which any degree of latitude the traveller may 
happen to find himself in, is cheerfully accepted as 
an accomplished fact. 

On the Grand Scud then, with a pocket-book 
passably well lined with oleaginous rouble notes, 
and a small wardrobe in a leathern bag, I have come 
with my friend, Alexis Hardshellovitch. You 
start at my fellow-traveller's patronymic, sounding, 
as it does, much more of a New York oyter-cellar 
than of a district in the government of Twer. Here 
is the meaning of Hardshellovitch. Alexis, though 
a noble Russian of innumerable descents, and of un- 
mistakable Tartar lineage, though wearing (at St. 
Petersburg,) the rigorous helmet, sword, and chok- 
ing suit ; though one of the corps of imperial pages, 
and hoping to be a hussar of Grodno by this time 
next year, is in speech, habits, and manners, an 
unadulterated citizen of the smartest nation in the 
creation. For Alexis's father, the general, was for 
many years Russian Minister Plenipotentiary at 
Washington in the district of Hail Columbia ! U. S. 



216 A JOUllNEY DUB NORTH. 

While there, he very naturally fell in love with, and 
married, one of the beautiful young daughters of 
that land ; and Alexis was the satisfactory result. 
After a hesitation of some seventy years standing, 
the general diplomatically made his mind up to die, 
and his family availed themselves of the circum- 
stance to bury him. Madame the ex- Ambassadress 
remained in Washington, and his son, being des- 
tined for the Russian service, was sent to St. Peters- 
burg to be educated. Fancy the young Anacharsis 
being sent from Athenian Academe to be educated 
among the Scythians ; or imagine Mrs. Hobson 
Newcome, of Bryanstone Square, sending one of 
her dear children to be brought up among the Zulu 
Kaffirs! The unfortunate Alexis was addressed, 
with care, to two ancient aunts (on the Muscovite 
side,) in the Italianskaia Oulitsa at St. Petersburg. 
These ladies were of the old Russian way of think- 
ing ; spoke not a word of French ; took gray snufF; 
drank mint brandy, and fed the young neophyte 
(accustomed to the luxurious fare of a diplomatic 
cuisne and Washington table d'hotes) on Stchi 
(cabbage soup,) batwinja (cold fish soup,) pirogues 
(meat pies,) and kvass. He had been used to sit 
under the Reverend Dr. D. Slocum Whittler (Re- 
generated-Rowdy persuasion) in a neat whitewashed 
temple, where lyric aspirations to Zion were sung to 
the music of Moore's Melodies ; he suddenly found 
himself in a land where millions of people bow down 
billions of times every day to trillions of sacred Sar- 
acens' heads. He was soon removed to the Ecole 
des Pages — that grand, gilt, gingerbread . structure 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 217 

(I do not call it so as in any way reflecting on its 
flimsiness, but because it is, outwardly, the exact 
colour of under-done gingerbread, profusely orna- 
mented with gold-leaf,) in the Sadovvaia, and which 
was formerly the palace of the Knights of St. John 
of Jerusalem. Here, he found French, German, and 
English professors ; but though he has been four 
years a page, the poor lad has been in a continual 
state of bewilderment ever since he left America. 
He has scarcely, as yet, mastered the first flight of 
the Giant's Staircase of Russian lexicology ; the Rus- 
sian gift of tongues seems denied to him ; his French 
smacks of German, and his German of French ; 
and his English, which, miserable youth, is of all 
languages the one he delights most to speak, is get- 
ting into an ancient and fishy condition. He misses 
his grammatical tip, frequently. He has ah exten- 
sive salad of languages in his head ; but he has 
broken the vinegar-cruet, and mislaid the oil -flask, 
and can't find the hard-boiled eggs. All his sympa- 
thies are Anglo-Saxon. He likes roast meat, cricket, 
boating, and jovial conversation ; and he is hand 
and foot a slave to the Dutch-doU-with-an-iron-mask 
discipline of the imperial pages, and the imperial 
court, and the imperial prisoners'-van and county- 
gaol system generally. He is fond of singing comic 
songs. He had better not be too funny in Russia ; 
there is a hawk with a double head in the next 
room. He is (as far as he has sense enough to be) 
a republican in principle. The best thing he can do 
is to learn by heart, and keep repeating the Angli- 
can litany, substituting Good Czar for Good Lord. 

10 



218 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

What a terrible state of things for an inoffensive 
and well-meaning young man ! Not to know 
whether he is on his head or his heels, morally. To 
be neither flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring, 
nationally. I wonder how many years it will take 
him to become entirely Russian : how long he will 
be before he will learn to dance, and perform the 
ceremony of the kou-tou — I mean the court bow — 
and leave off telling the truth, keeping the eighth 
commandment, and looking people straight in the 
face. Not very long, I am afraid. The Russian 
academical course of moral ethics is but a short cur- 
riculum ; and, once, matriculated, you graduate 
rapidly. In no other country but Russia — not even 
in our own sunsetless empire, with its myriad tribu- 
taries — can you find such curious instances of de- 
nationalization. Alexis Hardshellovitch had a friend 
whose acquaintance I had also the honour of mak- 
ing, who was also in the Corps des Pages, and who 
came to samovarise, or take tea with us, one even- 
ing, in patent-leather boots and white kid gloves ; 
and who talked so prettily about potichomanie and 
Mademoiselle BagdanofF, the ballet-dancer, (all in 
the purest Parisian,) that I expected the next sub- 
jects of his conversation would be Shakspeare and 
the musical glasses. What do you imagine his 
name was ? Genghis Khan ! (pronounced Zinghis 
Khan.) He was of the creamiest Tartar extraction, 
and mincingly confessed that he was descended in 
a direct line from that conqueror. He was a great 
prince at home ; but the Russians had mediatized 
him, and he was to be an oiFicer in the Mussulman 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 219 

escort of the Czar. He had frequently partaken of 
roast horse in his boyhood, and knew where the best 
tap of mares' milk was, down Mongolian- Tartary 
way, I have no doubt ; but I have seen him eat ices 
at Dominique's on the Nevskoi with much grace, 
and ke was quite a lady's man. 

Alexis Hardshellovitch does not feel his excep- 
tional and abnormal position to any painful extent ; 
inasmuch as, though one of the worthiest and most 
amiable fellows alive, he is a tremendous fool. He 
is a white Russian — not coming from White Russia, 
understand, but with white eyelashes, and fawn- 
coloured hair, and a suety complexion, and eyes that 
have not been warranted to wash, for they have run 
terribly, and the ground-colour has been quite boiled 
out of them. He has a glimmering, but not decided 
notion, of his want of brains himself. " I know I 
am ugly," he candidly says, " my dear good mother 
always told me so, and my father, who was hel homme, 
used to hit me cracks because I had such large ears. 
I must be ugly, because the Director of the Corps 
has never selected me to be sent to the palace as a 
page of the chamber. I should like to be a page of 
the chamber, for they wear chamarrures of gold bul- 
lion on their skirts behind ; but they only pick out 
the handsome pages. They say I should give the 
Empress an attack of nerves with my ears. Yet I 
am a general and ambassador's son. I, Some — " 
He spits. " But I'm not a fool. No ; I guess not. 
Prince Bouillabaissoff says I am a bete ; but Genghis 
Khan tells me that I have the largest head of all the 
imperial pages. How can I be a fool with such a 



220 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

large head ? Tell." The honest youth has, it must 
be admitted, an enorrtious nut. Though I love him 
for his goodness and simplicity, I am conscious al- 
ways of an uneasy desire to take that head of his 
between my hands, as if it were indeed a nut, and 
of the cocoa species, and crack it against a stone 
wall, to see if there be any milk to be accounted for, 
inside. 

I have been staying, in this broiling midsummer 
mad-dog weather, at the hospitable country mansion 
of Alexis Hardshellovitch's aunts ; and we two have 
come on the Grand Scud in a respectable old caleche, 
supposed to have been purchased in France by the 
diplomatic general during the occupation of Paris 
by the allies in eighteen hundred and fifteen. It has 
been pieced and repaired by two generations of 
Russian coach-cobblers since ; has been relined with 
some fancy stuff which I believe to have been, in 
the origin, window-curtains ; the vehicle, probably, 
has not been painted since the Waterloo campaign, 
but the wheels are plentifully greased ; we have an 
ample provision of breaks, and drags, and " skids ; " 
we have three capital horses — one a little black Bit- 
chok — lithe, limber, long-maned, and vicious, but an 
admirable galloper, and dressSe a la volee, and we 
have a very paragon of a postilion or coachman, I 
scarcely know whether to call him Ischvostchik or 
Jemstchik, for now he sits on the box, and now he 
bestrides the splashboard, where the splinter-bar is 
his brother, and the traces make acquaintance with 
his boots. I say he is a paragon ; for he can go a 
week without getting drunk, never falls asleep on 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 221 

the box, and however bad the roads may be, never 
lands the caleche in a deep hole. Inexhaustibly- 
good-tempered and untiringly musical he is, of 
course ; he would not be a Russian else. He be- 
longs to Alexis — or rather, will do so at his majority ; 
when that large-headed page will possess much land 
and many beeves — human beeves, I mean, with 
beards and boots, and baggy breeches. But I don't 
think that Alexis will administer much Stick to his 
slaves when he comes to his kingdom. He has a 
hard shell, but a soft heart. 

It is lucky we have Petr' Petrovitch the paragon 
with us in our journey from Ejew, for we have long 
left the great Moscow Road, (I don't speak of the 
rail but of the chaussee) and have turned into an 
abominable Sentier de Traverse^ a dreadful region, 
where marshes have had the black vomit, and spumed 
lumps of misshapen raven-like forest — black roots of 
trees — inky jungles, so to speak. Can you imagine 
any thing more horrible than a dwarf forest — for the 
trees are never tall hereabout — stems and branches 
hugger-muggering close together like conspirators 
weaving some diabolical plot, with here and there a 
gap of marsh pool between the groups of trees, as if 
some woodland criminals, frightened at their own tur- 
pitude, had despairingly drowned themselves, and rid- 
ded the earth of their black presence. Some corpses 
of these float on the surface of the marsh, but the 
summer time has been as merciful to them as the 
redbreasts were to the children in the wood, and has 
covered them with a green pall. There must be 
capital teal, and widgeon and snipe-shooting here in 



222 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH, 

autumn — shooting enough to satisfy that insatiate 
sportsman, Mr. Ivan TourgueniefF; but, at present, 
the genus homo does not shoot. He is shot by red- 
dart, from the inexhaustible quiver of the sun. He 
does not hunt ; he is hunted by rolling clouds of 
pungent dust, by disciplined squadrons of gnats, and 
by flying cohorts of blue-bottles and gadflies. The 
sun has baked the earth into angular clods, and our 
caleche and horses go hopping over the acclivities 
like a daddy-long-legs weak in the knee-joints over 
a home-baked crusty loaf. There is no cultivation 
in this part — no trees — no houses. I begin to grow 
as hotly thirsty as on that famous day when I drank 
out of the Pot, walking twenty miles, from Lancaster 
to Preston ; but out of evil cometh good in Russian 
travelling. As you are perfectly certain, before start- 
ing, that you will not find any houses of entertain- 
ment on the road, except at stated distances ; and 
that the refreshments provided there will probably 
be intolerable, no person in a sane mental condition 
either rides or drives a dozen miles in the country 
without taking with him a complete apparatus for 
inward restoration. We have a comfortable squarQ 
box covered with tin, which unthinking persons 
might rashly assume to be a dressing-case, but which 
in reality contains a pint-and-a-half samovar; a store 
of ^i\Q charcoal thereunto belonging ; a tchainik, or 
tea-pot of terra cotta, tea-cups, knives, forks, and 
tea-canister. If we were real Russians — hot as it 
is — we should incite Petr' Petrovitch to kindle a fire, 
heat the samovar, and set to tea-drinking with much 
gusto. As we have Anglo-Saxon notions, if not 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 223 

blood, we resort to that other compartment of the 
tin chest where the mighty case-bottle of cold brandy 
and water is — large, squab, flat, and fitting into the 
bottom of the box. Then, each lighting a papiros, 
we throw ourselves back in the caleche. Petr' Petro- 
vitch has not been forgotten in the case-bottle line, 
and we bid our conductor to resume the grandest of 
Scuds. We have an indefinite idea that we shall 
come upon one of Prince Bouillabaissoff's villages 
in an hour or so. This, too, is about the time to 
tell you that Alexis, though an imperial page, is clad 
in a Jim Crow hat, a baker's jacket, nankeen panta- 
loons, and a Madras handkerchief loosely tied round 
his turn-down shirt collar. These are the vacations 
of the imperial pages — very long vacations they 
have — from May to August, and once in the country, 
Alexis may dress as he pleases ; but in St. Peters- 
burg, it would be as much as his large ears are worth 
to appear without the regulation choke outfit — the 
sword, casque, belt, and, to use an expression of 
Mumchance, " coat buttoned up to here." Friend 
of my youth ! why canst thou not come with me 
frpm the Rents of Tattyboys to All the Russias ? 
For here thou wouldst find, not one or two, but 
millions of men, all with their coats buttoned up to 
here. 

I said ONE of Prince Bouillabaissoff 's villages, for 
the prince is a proprietor on a large scale, and owns 
nearly a dozen, containing in all some twenty hun- 
dred douscha (souls) or serfs. But our Grand Scud 
principle is vindicated when we diverge from the 
marshes and the baked clods into the commence- 



224 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

merit of a smooth well-kept road, and learn from 
Petr' Petrovitch, whom we have hitherto foreborne 
interrogating, that we are approaching the village of 
M. de KatorichassofF. 

The good Russian roads are oases between deserts. 
In the immediate vicinity of the seigneur's resi- 
dence the roads are beautifully kept. No English 
park avenue could surpass them in neatness, regu- 
larity, smoothness, — nay, prettiness and cheerfulness. 
There are velvety platebandes of greensward by the 
roadside, and graceful poplars, and sometimes elms. 
But once out of the baron's domains, and even the 
outlying parts^ of his territory, the roads — high and 
bye — become the pitiable paths of travail and ways 
of tribulation, of which I have hinted in the Czar's 
Highway. There is a humorous fiction that the 
proprietors of the soil are bound to keep the public 
roads in order, and another legend — but more satir- 
ical than humorous — that the government pays a 
certain yearly sum for the well-keeping of the roads. 
Government money is an ignis fatuical and impal- 
pable thing in E-ussia. You may pay, but you do 
not receive. As to the proprietors they will see the 
government barbacued before they will do any thing 
they are not absolutely compelled to do ; and the 
upshot of the matter is, that a problem something 
like the following is offered for solution. If two 
parties are bound to perform a contract of mutual 
service, and neither party performs it, which party 
has a right to complain ? 

M. de KatorichassofF, however — or rather Herr 
Vandergutlers, his North German bourmister, or 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 225 

intendant, for the noble Barynn is no resident just 
now (Hombourg, roulette, and so forth) — would very 
soon know the reason why all the roads about the 
seigneurial village were not kept in apple-pie order. 
They say that in Tsafskoe-Selo palace gardens, near 
Petersburg, there is a corporal of invalids to run 
after every stray leaf that has fallen from a tree, and 
a police officer to take every unauthorized pebble on 
the gravel walks into custody. Without going so 
far as this, it is certain that there are plenty of peas- 
ants mis a corvee^ that is, working three compulsory 
days' labour for the lord, to mend and trim the 
roads, clip the platebandes,.and prune the trees ; and 
the result is, ultimately, a charmingly umbrageous 
avenue through which we make our entrance into 
Volnoi-Voloshtchok. 

Though M. de K. (you will excuse the rest of the 
name, I know) has only one village, he has deter- 
mined to do every thing in it en grand seigneur. 
He has a church and a private police-station, and 
a common granary for corn ; and, wonder of won- 
ders I he has a wooden watchtower surmounted by a 
circular iron balcony, and with the customary appa- 
ratus of telegraphic signals in case of fire. As you 
can see the whole of the village of Volnoi — its one 
street, the chateau of the Barynn, and the mill of 
Mestrophan-Kouprianoritch — at one glance, stand- 
ing on the level ground, and as there are no other 
buildings for ten miles round, the utility of a watch- 
tower does not seem very obvious. Still, let us 
have discipline, or die. So there were watchmen, I 
suppose, at one time ; but the balcony is tenantless 

10* 



226 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

now, and one of the yellow balls is in a position, 
according to the telegraphic code, denoting a raging 
conflagration somewhere. There is nothing on fire, 
that I know of, except the sun. Where is the watch- 
man, too ? There are plenty of vigorous old men 
with long white beards, who would enact to the life 
the pB,rt of that dreary old sentinel in Agamemnon 
the King, who, in default of fire,, or water, or the 
enemy, or whatever else he is looking out for, prog- 
nosticates such dismal things about Clytemnestra's 
goings on and the state of Greece generally. Why 
didn't the terrible queen kill that old bore, same time 
she murdered her husband? He has been prosing 
from that watchtower going on three thousand 
years. There seems to be no necessity, either, for 
the watchtower to have any windows, but broken 
ones, or any door save four shameful old planks 
hanging by one wooden hinge, and for the hot sun 
to glare fiercely through crevices in the walls that 
have not been made by the wood shrinking, but by 
the absence of part or parcel of the walls themselves. 
Why empty balcony, why broken windows, why 
wooden hinges, why one hinge, why yawning walls ? 
This : the lord is at Hombourg ( — actress of the 
Folies Dramatiques — ^run of ill-luck on the red, and 
so forth,) and Herr Vandergutlers, his intendant's 
paramount business is to send him silver roubles. 
More silver roubles, and yet more ! So those of his 
serfs who pay him a yearly rent, or obrok, have had 
that obrok considerably increased ; and those who 
were a corvee have been compelled to go upon 
obrok ; and everybody, man, woman, and child, 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 227 

patriarch and young girl, have been pinched, pressed, 
screwed, and squeezed, beaten, harassed, cozened, 
bullied, driven, and dragged by the North German 
intendant for more silver roubles — more silver rou- 
bles still — for M. de Katorichassoff, at Hombourg. 
There the man who deals the cards, and the woman 
who rouges her face, divide the Russian prince's 
roubles between them, (a simple seigneur here, he 
is Prince Katorichassoff at Hombourg ;) and this is 
why, you can understand, that the fire-engine de- 
partment has been somewhat neglected, and its 
operation suspended at Volnoi-Voloschtchok. As 
for the state of decay into which the building, 
though barely two years old, is falling, that is easily 
accounted for. The villagers are stealing it piece- 
meal. They have already stolen the lower part of 
the staircase, and thereby have been too clever for 
themselves, as they cannot get at the balcony, which, 
being of jreal iron, must make their mouths water. 
The hinges were originally made of wood, together 
with all the clamps, and rivets, and bolts employed 
in the lower part of the structure, through a knowl- 
edge of the fact patent and notorious, that iron any- 
where within his reach is as much too much for the 
frail morality of a Russian peasant as of a South 
Sea native. He will steal the iron tires off wheels : 
he will (and has frequently) stolen the chains of sus- 
pension bridges. I don't think he would object to 
being loa'ded with chains, if he could steal and sell 
his fetters. 

On domains like those of Prince Bouillabaissoff, 
the fire-engine and watch-tower orga,nization is not 



228 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

a weak-minded caricature, but an imposing reality. 
And the importance of such a preventive establish- 
ment can with difficulty be exaggerated. Of course, 
his dwelling being of wood, and easily ignitable, the 
Russian is incredibly careless with combustibles. It 
is one large tinder-box. This is why fire-insurance 
companies do not flourish in Russia. It may cer- 
tainly be asked what special reason the Russian has 
for adopting any precautions against conflagrations. 
Many reasons h^ certainly has not. He has about 
the same personal interest in his house as a pig 
might have in his stye. His breeder must give him 
four walls to live in, and a trough to eat his grains 
from, — but he may be driven to market any day, — 
he may be pork (and well-scored, for the bakehouse) 
by next Wednesday week. Again, his house is 
not unlike a spider's web, — easily destroyed, easily 
reconstructed. The housemaid's broom, or the de- 
stroying element, — it is all the same ; a little saliva to 
the one, and a few logs to the other, and the spider 
and the moujik are at work again. You don't ask 
a baby to mend his cradle. When it is past service 
papa goes out and buys him a new one. There is 
this paternal relation between the lord and. the serf, 
(besides the obvious non-rod«sparing to avoid the 
child-spoiling one,) that the former is to a certain 
extent compelled to provide for the material wants 
of his big-bearded bantling. If Ivan's roof be burnt 
over his head, the lord must find him at least the 
materials for another habitation ; if the harvests 
have fallen short, or an epizootis has decimated the 
country side, hq must feed them. The serf tills the 



THE SLOBODA. A EUSSIAN VILLAGE. 229 

ground for his lord, but he must have seeds given 
him to sow with. The Russian peasant having 
absolutely no earthly future to look forward to, it is 
but reasonable that his proprietor should supply the 
exigent demands of the present moment. There is 
no absolute right of existence guaranteed ; but the 
master's natural interest in the souls he possesses, 
having means sufficient to keep their bodies alive 
withal, obviously prompts him to keep them fed, 
and housed, and clothed. There are his lands ; 
when they have done their three days' work for 
him, they may raise enough corn in the next three 
days' serivat to make their black bread with. There 
are his hemp, and flax, and wool, — their women can 
spin, themselves can weave such hodden gray as 
they require to cover their nakedness. There are 
his secular woods ; they may cut pine-logs there to 
make their huts. As regards the rigid necessary, — 
the bare elements of food, covering, and shelter, — 
the nobility's serfs have decidedly the same advan- 
tage over the twenty millions or so of crown slaves 
(facetiously termed free peasants) as Mr. Legree's 
negroes have over the free-born British paupers of 
Buckinghamshire, or Gloucestershire, or — out with 
it — St. James's, Westminster, and St. George's, 
Hanover Square. In a crown village, in a time 
of scarcity, the sufferings of the free peasants are 
almost incredibly horrible. Then the wretched vil- 
lagers, after having eaten their dogs, their cats, and 
the leather of their boots y after being seen scraping 
together handfuls of vermin to devour ; after going 
out into the woods, and gnawing the bark off' the 



230 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

trees ; after swallowing clay -and weeds to deceive 
their stomachs ; after lying in wait, with agonized 
wistfulness, for one solitary traveller to whom they 
can lift their hands to beg alms ; after having under- 
gone all this, they go out from their famine-stricken 
houses into the open fields and waste places, and 
those that are sickening build a kind of tilt awning- 
hut with bent twigs covered with rags, over those 
that are sick, and they rot first and die afterwards. 
In famines such as these, the people turn black, like 
negroes ; whole families go naked ; and though, poor 
wretches, they would steal the nails from horses' 
shoes, the crank and- staple from a gibbet, or the 
trepanning from a man's scull, they refrain won- 
drously from cannibalism, from mutual violence, 
and from any thing like organized depredations on 
the highway ; — they fear the Czar and the police to 
the last gasp. Nor, do I conscientiously believe, if 
the richest shrines of the richest Sabors of all Peters- 
burg, Moscow, KiefF, and Novgorod — heavy with 
gold and silver, and blazing with costly jewels — 
were to be set up in the midst of their breadless, 
kopeckless, village, would they abstract one jewelled 
knob from the crozier of a saint, one tinselled ray 
from the aureole of the Panagia. At last, when 
many have died, and many more are dying, a stifled 
wail, which has penetrated with much difiiculty 
through the ofl&cial cotton-stufl'ed ears of district po- 
lice auditoria, district chambers of domains, military 
chiefs of governments, and imperial chancelleries, 
without number, comes soughing into the private 
cabinet of the Czar at the Winter Palace or Peter- 



THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 231 

hofF. The Empress, good soul, sheds tears when she 
hears of the dreadful sufferings of the poor people 
so many hundred versts off. The imperial children, 
I have no doubt, wonder why, if the peasants have 
no bread to eat, they don't take to plum-cake ; the 
emperor is affected, but goes to work ; issues an 
oukase ; certain sums from the imperial cassette are 
munificently affected to the relief of the most press- 
ing necessities. Do you know, my reader, that 
long months elapse before the imperial alms reach 
their wretched objects ? do you know that the im- 
perial bounty is bandied — all in strict accordance 
with official formality, of the like of which I have 
heard something nearer home— from department to 
department — from hand to hand ; and that to each 
set of greasy fingers, belonging to scoundrels in gold 
lace, and rogues with stars and crosses, and knaves 
of hereditary nobility, there sticks a certain percent- 
age on the sum originally allocated ? The Czar 
gives, and gives generously. The Tchinn lick, and 
mumble, and paw the precious dole, and when, at 
last, it reaches its rightful recipients, it is reduced to 
a hundredth of its size. Do you know one of the 
chief proverbs appertaining and peculiar to Russian 
serfdom ? — ^it is this — " Heaven is too high, the Czar 
is too far off." To whom are the miserable crea- 
tures to cry ? To Mumbo-Jumbovitch their priest, 
who is an ignorant and deboshed dolt, generally 
fuddled with kvass, who wilL tell them to kiss St. 
Nicholas's great toe ? To the nearest police-mayor, 
who will give them fifty blows with a stick, if they 
are troublesome, and send them about their busi- 



232 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ness ? To the Czar, who is so far off, morally and 
physically ? To Heaven ? Such famines as these 
have been in crown villages, on the great chaussee 
road from Petersburg to Moscow. Such famines 
have been, to our shame be it said, in our own 
free, enlightened, and prosperous United Kingdom, 
within these dozen years. But I ani not ashamed — 
no, pot-and-kettle philosophers, sympathizers with 
the oppressed Hindoo — no, mote-and-beam logicians 
full of condolence with the enslaved Irishman — I am 
not ashamed to talk of famines in Russia, because 
there have been famines in Skibbereen, and Orkney, 
and Shetland. The famine-stricken people may have 
been neglected, oppressed, wronged, by stupid and 
wicked rulers ; but I am not ashamed — I am rather 
proud to remember the burst of sympathy elicited 
from the breasts of millions among us, at the first 
recital of the sufferings of their brethren, — the stren- 
uous exertions made by citizens of every class and 
every creed to raise and send immediate succour to 
those who were in want. We commit great errors 
as a nation, but we repair them nobly; and I think 
we ought no more to wince at being reminded of 
our former backslidings, or refrain from denouncing 
and redressing wrongs wherever they exist, because, 
in the old time we have done wrongfully ourselves, 
than we ought to go in sackcloth, in ashes, because 
.Richard the Third murdered his nephews, or abstain 
from the repression of cannibalism in New Zealand, 
because our Druidical ancestors burnt human beings 
alive in wicker cages.* 

* The impressions hereabove set down respecting famine, and. 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 233 

XI. 

A COUNTRY HOUSE. 

I WANT to say a word more about Ireland, not 
argument atively, but as an illustration. I should 
have been dishonest in blinking Skibbereen ; the 
more so, as in all the narratives I have heard of the 
social characteristics of these appalling visitations, I 
could not help being struck with their grim and 
minute similitude to some features of the Irish 
famine that came within my own knowledge at the 
time. Some of the coincidences were extraordi- 
nary. The patience of the people. Their swarthi- 
ness of hue from inanition. Their patience and 
meekness during unexampled agony ; and, above all, 

indeed, most of the information on the subject of the condition of 
the Russian peasantry which may hereafter be found in these 
pages, are derived, not from official documents, not even from 
the trustworthy pages of M. de Haxthausen, who though profess- 
edly favourable to the Russian government, and painting, as far 
as he can, couleur de rose, lets out some very ugly truths occasion- 
ally ; but from repeated conversations I have held with Russian 
gentlemen, some high in office in ministerial departments, some 
men of scientific attainments, some university students, some mili- 
tary officers. All the facts I have rested my remarks upon have 
been told me with a calm, complacently-indifferent air, over tum- 
blers of tea, and paper cigarettes, and usually accompanied by a 
remark of c'est comme ga. And I think I kept my eyes sufficiently 
wide open during my stay, and was pretty well able to judge 
when my interlocutors were lying, and when they were telling 
the truth. 



234 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

their nakedness. To be naked and a-htingered 
would seem to be natural — the hungry man selling 
his clothes to buy bread ; but these people, Irish and 
Russian, went naked when they had plenty of rags, 
unsalable, but warmth-containing. There seem to 
be certain extreme stages of human misery, in which 
a man can no longer abide his garments. I have a 
curious remembrance of being told by a relative, 
who was in the famine-stricken districts in eighteen 
forty-seven, that, once losing his way over a moun- 
tain, he entered a cabin to inquire the proper road, 
and there found seven people of both sexes, children 
and adults, crouching round an empty saucepan, 
and all as bare as robins ! The eldest girl, who 
volunteered to show him the straight road, was mod- 
est as Irish girls are proud to be, and as she rose to 
escort him, clapped a wooden bowl over her shoul- 
der, as if it had been the expansive cloak of the 
demon page whom we read of in the Percy Reliques. 
I have been thinking of all these things and a 
great many more over tea and tobacco in the Star- 
osta's house in M. de KatorichassofF's village. 
There Alexis and I are comfortably seated during 
the noontide heats. The Starosta's daughter would 
have washed our feet for us, as Penelope's hand- 
maidens did for Ulysses, or Fergus Maclvor's duin- 
hie wassals for Waverley, if we had had any incli- 
nation that way. Perhaps I had corns ; perhaps 
Alexis, already becoming Russianized, had, like 
many of his patent leather-booted countrymen, no 
stockings on. It is certain that we did not avail 
ourselves of the footbath. The Starosta has in- 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 235 

formed us several times, and with as many profound 
bows, that his house no longer belongs to him, but 
that it, its contents, himself, his children and grand- 
children, are ours, and at the absolute disposal of 
our excellencies. Excellencies ! By the long-winded 
multisyllabic, but mellifluous epithets he has be- 
stowed on Alexis he must have called him his 
majesty, his coruscation, his scintillation, his milky- 
way, by this time. The Russians are great pro- 
ficients in low bows, and to Men savoir tirer la 
reverence is considered a superlative accomplish- 
ment. A distinguished Professor of Natural His- 
tory, attached to the University of Moscow — a great 
savant and a very taciturn man — once remarked to 
me gravely, that his brother Waldemar made the 
best bow of any boyard in the government of Sim- 
bersk, and added : " Ce gargon Id fera son chemin " 
— and indeed this is a country where, by dint of 
continuous and assiduous bowing, you may make 
surprising way in fortune and dignity. If you will 
bow low enough you may be sure to rise high in the 
Tchinn ; and if you don't mind grovelling a little on 
your stomach, and swallowing a little dust, there is 
no knowing to what imperial employment you may 
aspire. I think that Alexis has a secret admiration 
and envy of Genghis Khan, owing to the profoundly 
graceful bows that Tartar chieftain is so frequently 
making. I don't mind low bows. Perhaps if I 
knew an English duke I should be inclined to make 
him very low bows myself — at all events, I have 
compatriots who would ; but it is inexpressibly pain- 
ful and disgusting to a western traveller in Russia, 



236 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

when he happens to be on a visit at a gentleman's 
country house, to see stalwart bearded men posi- 
tively falling down and worshipping some scrubby 
young seigneur. If a peasant has the slightest 
favour to ask of his lord — ^the promotion of his wife, 
for instance, from the scullery to the fine-linen laun- 
dry — he begins his suit by falling plump on his 
knees, and touching the earth with his forehead. 
Even in Petersburg where Nous Autre s do not like 
to show th6 slave-owner's element more than they 
can help, I have seen' a sprightly young seigneur 
keep a gray-haired servitor full ten minutes on his 
knees before him lighting his pipe — cheerfully call- 
ing him swinia and durac (pig and fool) meanwhile, 
and playfully chucking him under the chin with the 
toe of his Kasan boot. 

We have refused the refreshment of vitchina, or 
dried pork, piroga, or meat pies, and ogourtzhofF, or 
salted cucumbers ; but we have cheerfully accepted 
the offer of a samovar, which, huge, brazen, and 
battered, glowers in the midst of the table like the 
giant helmet in the Castle of Otranto. We have 
our own tea and cups in the tin chest, but the Star- 
osta won't hear of our using either. He has tea — 
and capital tea it is — rather like tobacco in colour, 
and tasting slightly as if it had been kept in a can- 
ister in Mr. Atkinson the perfumer's shop ; besides 
this, he has, not tumblers for us to drink our tea 
from, but some articles he has the greatest pride 
and joy in producing — porcelansky, he calls them, 
in a voice quavering with emotion, as he takes them 
out of the chest containing his valuables. The por- 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 237 

celansky consists of two very fair china tea-cups, 
one of them minus a handle, but the loss supplied 
with a neat curve of twisted iron wire, and both 
duly set in saucers. One saucer is indubitable 
china ; it does not match the cup in size or pattern, 
certainly, but let that pass ; the other is — the cover 
of one of those shallow earthenware pots in which 
preserved meats and anchovy paste are sold ! I 
turn the familiar lid upside down, and there my 
eyes are gladdened with the sight of a coloured 
engraving burnt into the clay — the interior of 
Shakspeare's house at Stratford-upon-Avon ! My 
thoughts immediately revert to Mr. Quain's oyster- 
shop in the Haymarket, London, and I burst out 
laughing, to the amazement and abashment of the 
Starosta, who, thinking I am ridiculing him for 
having placed his saucer with the handsome part 
underneath, hastens to explain to Alexis that the 
cup won't maintain its position unless the saucer is 
turned upside down, expressing his regret, as the 
picture, which he assumes to be a view of the 
Dvoretz Londoni-Gorod, or Palace of the City of 
London, is dolgo harasho (very handsome indeed). 
Alexis, it is needless to say, interprets all this ; for 
my Russ is of the very weakest, as yet. Yet I 
cannot help a slight suspicion that my young friend's 
Moscov is not of the most powerful description, and 
that he makes very free translations of the Starosta's 
discourse for my benefit, and that like the dragoman 
in Eothen, he renders such a speech as " Your 
mightinesses are welcome ; most blessed among 
hours is this, the hour of his coming," by " The old 



238 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

fellow is paying us a lot of compliments. We are 
welcome enough, that is certain." The Starosta 
never saw Alexis before, but he has known the 
caleche for years, and he knows that the lad's senior 
aunt is the Baronessa Bigwigitsin, and if the Russo- 
American chose to eat him out of house and home, 
the Starosta would bow lower than ever, so near- 
neighbourly is he, and such an unfeigned and disin- 
terested attachment has he for the juvenile aris- 
tocracy. For, the Russian peasant, who is always 
burning a lamp before the shrine of his saint, 
astutely thinks that there is no harm in burning a 
candle to the other power, too : so he worships his 
seigneur, who is the very devil to him. 

I have had two tumblers of tea ; and by this time 
I have taken stock of the Starosta's house. It is 
the best in the village of Volnoi", and I should think 
the Starosta must have been a thrifty old gentleman, 
and must be by this time, pretty well to do in the 
world. I am sorry to hear from Alexis, however, that 
our venerable friend declares that he has not a co- 
peck in the world, and that he and his family are 
" whistling in their fists " for hunger. " He is a 
liar," Alexis says, unaffectedly. " They are all liars." 
The Starosta's dwelling, though, does not offer 
many signs of penury or distress. Here is the in- 
ventory. 

There is but one room on the ground-floor: a 
sufficiently vast apartment, of which the walls are of 
logs in all their native roundness, and the ceiling 
also of logs, but on which, to be quite genteel, some 
imperfect attempts at squaring have been made. 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 239 

There is not a glimpse of white- washing, painting 
or paper-hanging to be seen. The great Russian 
painter and decorator, DirtofF, has taken the cham- 
ber in hand, and has toned down walls, and ceiling, 
and flooring to one agreeable dingy gray. There is 
not much dust about ; no great litter, where all is 
litter ; not over-many cobwebs in the corners. The 
dirt is concrete. It is part of the party walls ; and 
I think that a thoroughly good scrubbing would send 
the Starosta's house tumbling about his ears. There 
are two windows to the room ; one is a show win- 
dow — EL large aperture, filled with" a peculiar dull, 
gray, sheenless glass. The panes are so gently and 
uniformly darkened with dirt, that the window serves 
much more to prevent impertinent wayfarers from 
looking in, than to assist the inmates of the mansion 
in looking out. The second window is a much 
smaller casement, cut apparently at random high up 
in the wall, and close to the ceiling, and of no par- 
ticular shape. Its panes are filled with something, 
but what that something may be I am unable to de- 
termine; not glass for a certainty, for the panes 
bulge inward, and some flap idly to and fro in the 
hot summer wind, which, like a restless dog, is wag- 
ging its tail in the sun outside ; — rags, perhaps, paper 
it may be, dried fish-skins — a favourite preparation 
for glazing windows — very likely. Whatever it be, 
it produces a very unwholesome-looking semi-trans- 
parency ; and big black spiders, tarrakans, and other 
ogglesome insects, crawl over its jaundiced field, like 
hideous ombres chinoises. One end of the apart- 
ment is partitioned off by a raw- wooden screen, 



240 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

some six feet in height; but whether that be the 
family bed-chamber or the family pigsty I am quite 
at a loss to say. The former hypothesis is scarcely 
tenable, inasmuch as beneath the image of the saint 
there is a sort of wooden pit, half above ground and 
half under it — half a sarcophagus and half a ditch 
— ^which from a mighty bolster — ^that gigantic saus- 
age like sack of black leather must be a bolster, for 
I can see the oleaginous marks on. it where heads 
have lain — and a counterpane bariole in so many 
stripes and counterstripes of different colours that it 
looks like the union-jack, I conjecture to be the 
Starosta's family bed. His summer bed, of course ; 
where his winter bed is we all know — it is there on 
the top of the long stove, where the heap of once 
white — now black with dirt and grease — sheepskins 
are. If I had any doubt about this wooden grave 
being a bed, it would be at once dispelled ; first, by 
the sight of a leg covered with a dusty boot which 
suddenly surges into the air from beneath the waves 
of the particoloured counterpane like the mast of a 
wrecked vessel ; and ultimately by a head dusty and 
dishevelled as to its hair, and bright crimson as to 
its face, which bobs up to the surface, glimmers for 
a moment, and then disappears — to continue the 
nautical simile — like the revolving pharos of the 
Kish Lightship. From a hiccup, too, and a grunt, 
I am further enabled to conjecture that there must 
be somebody in the bed ; and from some suppressed 
whisperings, I am inclined to think that there are 
some small matters in the way of children down 
somewhere in the vast depths of this Russian Great 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 241 

Bed of Ware. On the latter subject I am not en- 
lightened; but on the former my mind is set at rest 
by the statement volunteered by the Starosta, that 
his eldest grandson Sophron is lying down there, 
" as drunk as oil " — whatever that state of intoxica- 
tion may be. He went out this morning, it appears, 
to the Seignorial Kontova, or steward's office, with 
a little present to the Alemansky-Bourmister, or 
German Intendant of the Barynn, and on Gospodin 
Vandergutler's deigning to give Sophron some green 
wine, or vodki, Sophron deigned to drink thereof, till 
he found himself, or was found, in the aforesaid oily 
state of drunkenness. I should say myself, that 
Sophron is more what may be termed " dumb 
drunk ; " for, on his grandfather seizing him by the 
hair of his head on one of its visits to the surface, 
and rating him in most abusive Russ, Sophron 
makes superhuman efforts to reply, but can get no 
further than an incoherent and inarticulate gabble ; 
after which, leaving some of his hair behind like 
seaweed, he dives down to the bottom of the coun- 
terpane ocean — again to confer, I suppose, with his 
little brothers and sisters, or with Neptune, or the 
Nereides, or the Great Sea Serpent. " The ape and 
pig," says the vexed Starosta, " threw himself into 
the bed while I was at Mestrophan's mill. I could 
sober him in a moment with a bucket of water, but 
your excellencies will understand that I do not want 
to spoil the pastyel, (or bed,) which is of great civ- 
iation, (civilization,) and came from Moscow, where 
my eldest son Dmitri has been an Ischvostchik Mac- 

ter for twenty years, paying one hundred and eighty 

11 



242 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

silver roubles yearly to his lord and ours, the Barynn 
Vacil-Apollodorovitch, (M. de K.) and owning him- 
self fourteen droschkies with theirhorses." Appar- 
ently fearing that he had let the cat somewhat out 
of the money-bag in alluding to the prosperous con- 
dition of his son Dmitri, the Starosta hastened to 
assure Alexis that the dbrok (or yearly slave-rent) 
was a frightfully hard thing for a poor Christianin 
to pay, and that what with that and the police and 
the government dues, his poor Dmitri had nothing 
to feed or clothe his children with. " This is his 
son," he adds, pointing to the part of the counter- 
pane where the oily drunkard had last foundered 
with all hands, and his cargo of green wine on 
board : "judge what we are able to do with such a 
cow's-nephew as this on our hands ! However, if 
your excellencies will deign to pardon me, I will 
soon rid you of this Turk's-brother's presence." I 
don't know what Alexis answers to this harangue, 
but I hasten to assure the Starosta with much ges- 
ticulation, and many harostros and nitchevos, (all 
right and never mind,) that I have not the slightest 
objection to the drunken man in the bed, and, as he 
is quite dumb, that I rather liked his revolving light- 
house appearance than otherwise. The Starosta, 
however, apparently convinced that he or Sophron 
must be sinning against etiquette in some way or 
other, makes a last desperate plunge after that ship- 
wrecked convivialist. He brings him to the shore 
after much puffing and blowing, and rolls or drags 
his long body across the floor and out at the front 
door, where, from some dull heavy sounds, and a ter- 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 243 

rific howling, I presume that he is correcting his 
grandson with a joint-stool, or a log of wood, or a 
crowbar, or a hatchet, or some switch-like trifle of that 
description. Then I hear the slush of the proposed 
bucket of water. The Starosta comes in, and reapolo- 
gizes to Alexis ; and when Sophron rejoins us, which 
he does in about ten minutes to fill the samovar, he 
is, though still very damp and somewhat tangled 
about the hair, and purply-streaked about the face, 
as grave, sober, and likely a young Russian as ever 
wore a red shirt and made beautiful bows. 

I have spoken of the image of the saint. It is 
here that the Starosta's commercial secret oozes out. 
It is here that the paucity of copecks, and the sibi- 
lation in the fists for hunger becomes notorious as 
airy fabrications. Like every Russian peasant shop- 
keeper merchant — from the miserable moujik of a 
crown- village to the merchant of the first guild with 
his millions of roubles — Nicolai latchkofF, the Sta- 
rosta's pride and pleasure is to have a joss in his 
house, as handsome as ever he can afford it to be. 
And a brave St. Nicholas he has. The picture it- 
self is simply hideous — a paralytic saint with an 
enormous aureole, like a straw hat, sitting in a most 
uncomfortable attitude upon a series of cream- 
coloured clouds in regular tiers, like the wig of the 
Lord Mayor's coachman. It is painted, or rather 
daubed, in the most glaring and coarsest oil-colours ; 
but the aureole above the saint's head is formed of 
metallic rays of a certain dull, yellow, Guinea-coast 
like appearance, that make me certain— though the 
Starosta would probably call St. Nicholas himself to 



244 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

witness that the contrary was the fact — that these 
rays are of pure gold. And there are some rings on 
St. Nicholas's fingers, and some stars on his alb and 
rochet, and a great bulb on his pastoral crook, that 
are green, and white, and crimson, and glisten very 
suspiciously. I have an idea that they are emeralds, 
and carbuncles, and seed-pearls, my friend Nicolai. 
I know the massive, chased, and embossed lamp 
that hangs, always kindled, before the image, to be 
silver ; the picture itself is covered with a fair wide 
sheet of plate-glass; the whole is framed in rose- 
wood, carved and gilded in great profusion ; and I 
should not at all wonder if the original cost of this 
image to the soi-disant impoverished Starosta had 
been five hundred silver roubles at the very least. 
St. Nicholas is one of the most popular and most 
considered of the Russian saints, and the late Czar 
probably owed no small portion of his immense in- 
fluence to the fact of his bearing the same name as 
that saint of high renown. Touching St. Nicholas, 
there is a ludicrous tradition current among the Rus- 
sian peasantry to the effect that he once had a theo- 
logical dispute with Martin Luther, and that they 
agreed to settle it by a walking-match. It was to 
be so many hundred versts up . a mountain, and 
neither party was to have any assistance beyond a 
stout walking-staff. For once the Protestant cham- 
pion was victorious, for St. Nicholas was thoroughly 
blown before he had accomplished half the journey. 
The detested heretic came back triumphant, but 
with empty hands. " Where's your walking-stick, 
dog's son?" cried the good St. Nicholas. "Ant' 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 245 

please you, I ate it," answered his opponent. The 
wary Doctor Martin Lather had had a walking-stick 
constructed of good black-puddings twisted together, 
and had eaten as he walked — the creature comforts 
giving him such bodily strength that he had^easily 
overcome his antagonist. 

The large ground-floor apartment, as it may be 
called, though it is raised somewhat above the level 
of the soil, as you shall hear presently, is called the 
Balschoi-Isba, or Big Room ; and sometimes, on 
the eternal lucus a non lucendo, however sombre it 
may be, the Beleeia-Isba, or Chamber of Light. 
The space at the end, partitioned off like a church- 
warden's pew, is considered as strictly private, — 
there is no admittance except on business. When 
I say private, I mean, of course, to persons of the 
peasant's own degree ; the shaven-chins — by which 
title the hirsute moujiks sometimes designate those 
whose nobility, official standing, military employ- 
ment, or foreign extraction, entitle them to go beard- 
less — enter where they please, and do what they 
please, when they deign to enter a peasant's house. 
(And here a parenthesis respecting beards. One of 
the last items of advice volunteered to me by a very 
dear friend, just previous to leaving England for 
Russia, was to let my beard grow. I should find it 
so comfortable in travelling, he said. "I had all the 
wish, though perhaps not the power, to effect this 
desirable consummation ; but I very soon found, on 
my arrival at St. Petersburg, that if I wanted to be 
waited on with promptitude in hotels, spoken to 
with civility by police-officers, or received with po- 



246 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

liteness in society, I mast go with a smoothly-shaven 
chin. Moustaches were generally patronized, whis- 
kers tolerated ; but a beard — the nasty moujiks wore 
beards ! The only person moving in elevated Rus- 
sian society, six months ago, who ventured to set 
the aristocratic squeamishness as to hairy chins at de- 
fiance, was the American minister, who was bearded 
like the pard. Then, in July, came out Lord Wode- 
house, our ambassador, also wearing a beard of re- 
spectable dimensions ; and the enormous influx of 
strangers into Moscow at the coronation fetes, and 
the cosmopolitan variety of aristocratic beards wag- 
ged thereat, must by this time have familiarized the 
Russians with the sight of hairy chins unassociated 
with sheepskin coats and baggy breeches.) 

Why " deign " to enter ? you may ask. Why 
deign to do this or that ? For I am conscious of 
having repeated the locution with considerable fre- 
quency. The fact is, that the Russian peasant does 
not say of his superior — and especially of his lord — 
that he eats, or drinks, or sleeps ; but that he deigns 
to taste something ; that he deigns to moisten his 
lips ; that he deigns to take some repose. These 
words — he deigns — become at last so natural to the 
serf in speaking of his master, that it is anything 
but rare to hear from his mouth such phrases as 
these ; " The Barynn deigned to have the measles. 
His excellency deigned to tumble down stairs. His 
lordship deigned to die." Isvolit Kapout ! This, it 
seems to me, is the converse to the historical tournure 
de phrase of Lord Castlecomer's mamma when his 
lordship's tutor happened to break his leg, " which 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 247 

was so very inconvenient to my Lord Castlecomer." 
The miserable condition of the souls attached to 
the glebe is brought to your mind by a hundred 
slavish proverbs and expressions. Slavery is so well 
organized, and so saturates the social system, that 
the very dictionary is impregnated with slavish words, 
A people philologically servile, and whose proverbs 
exhale a spirit of dog-like obedience and hopeless 
resignation, and sometimes abject glorification of 
despotism, is indeed a rarity. The miserable Afri- 
cans, debased as they have been by centuries of 
bondage, have no such popular sayings, if I remem- 
ber rightly, as, " Cow-hide am good for niggers ; " 
" Woolly head and scored back always go together ; " 
" Sky too high up, Canada too far off.". But among 
the E/Ussian peasants, these are a few of the proverbs 
current and common : "A man who has been well 
beaten is worth two men who haven't been beaten." 
" Five hundred blows with a stick will make a good 
grenadier ; a thousand a dragoon ; and none at all 
a captain." " 'Tis only the lazy ones who don't beat 
us." Can anything be more horrible than this tacit, 
shoulder-shrugging, almost smirking acceptation of 
the stick as an accomplished fact, — of the Valley of 
the Shadow of Stick as a state of life into which it 
has pleased God to call them ! Again : " Heaven is 
too high : the Czar is too far off." This is simply 
Dante's Lasciate ogni speranza Russianized. Again : 
" All belongs to God and the Czar." " Though 
against thy heart, always be ready to do what thou 
art ordered to do." " One can be guilty without 
guilt." The last proverb, with the preceding one. 



248 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

imply an abnegation of the duties and responsibili- 
ties of manhood altogether. Its application justi- 
fies a serf in robbing and murdering at the command 
of his master ; the serf is guilty, but the onus of 
guilt is on him who sets him on. There is one Rus- 
sian proverb that breathes something like a feeble 
consciousness of the horrors of slavery, and the cor- 
responding blessings of liberty. " The bird is well 
enough in a golden cage, but he is better on a green 
branch." There is another proverb I have heard, 
couched in a somewhat similar spirit : " The la- 
bourer works like a peasant, [a slave,] but he sits 
down to table like a lord." This is too politically 
and economically wise, I am afraid, to be genuine, 
and has probably been invented ad hoc, and placed 
in the mouth of the moujik by some anti-slavery 
philanthropists. In familiar conversation you will 
sometimes hear a Russian say : " Without cutting 
my head off, allow me to say," &c. This is a pleas- 
ant reminiscence of the formula anciently observed 
in commencing a petition to the Czar : " Do not or- 
der our heads to be cut off, O mighty Czar, for pre- 
suming to address you, but hear us ! " The Russian 
equivalent to our verb " to petition " is " to strike 
the ground with one's forehead." And the " Yes, 
sir," of a tchelovik, or eating-house waiter, when you 
order a chop, is " Sluschett," (I hear and obey.) 
Will any man believe that this system of slavery, 
which would appear to be the growth of twenty cen- 
turies, which has its language, and proverbs, and folk- 
lore, is, in its authorized and consolidated form, bare- 
ly two hundred and fifty years old ? It only dates, 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 249 

legally, from the reign of Boris Godounoff. But I 
happened to speak of dictionaries. Oyez, oyez ! let 
all men know that the imperial Catherine, second of 
that name, and of imperishable memory, positively 
issued, one day — perhaps in an access of capricious 
philanthropy, and after receiving a letter from 
D'Alembert — an oukase ordering the word Slave 
to be for ever and ever erased and expunged from 
the imperial dictionary. The philosophical firm 
of D'Alembert, Diderot, and Co., made a great deal 
of this at the time, and there have been some 
attempts to make more of it since. For my part, I 
must say that the imperial word suppression reminds 
me very much of the manner in which penitent (in 
Pentonville) housebreakers speak of their last bur- 
glary (accompanied by violence) as their culpable 
folly. And yet this wretched people seem as habit- 
uated and to the manner born to slavery, as if they 
had been serfs from the time when it was said to 
Ham, "A slave and a servant shalt thou be ; " and as 
if there were really any truth in the grinning theory 
of the German traveller, that the Russian back was 
organized to receive blows, and that his nerves are 
less delicate than those of western nations. 

The reader has been deigning, I am afraid, to 
wait a long time for the conclusion of the inventory 
of the Starosta's house at Volno'i ; and I have been 
in truth an unconscionable time in possession. But 
the Starosta's house, though it is but a log hut, is 
full of pegs to hang thoughts upon ; though I must 
now really leave the pegs, and give the walls a turn. 
There are thereupon some more works of art — secu- 
u* 



250 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

lar ones — ^besides the ecclesiastical triumph of the 
blessed Saint Nicholas. In poorer cottages, (if the 
pretty, homely, ivy and honeysuckle smelling name 
of cottage can be applied to the dreary dull dens the 
Russians live in,) these lay pictures would probably 
be merely the ordinary Loubotchynia, vile daubs of 
the reigning Czar, or of Petr' Velike, glaring on 
sheets of bark, or the coarsest paper. But the Star- 
osta being rich, he has four notable engravings — 
real engravings, apparently executed in a very coarse 
taille douce upon white paper, brilliantly if not har- 
moniously coloured ; framed, in what may be termed, 
cabbage rose-wood, so vividly red and shining is it, 
and duly glazed. There is, of course, the late Czar 
Nicholas-^one of the portraits taken of him about 
twenty years since — when his admirers delighted in 
describing him as an Apollo with the bearing of 
Jupiter, and the strings of his lyre twisted into thun- 
derbolts ; — when he wore a tremendous cocked hat, 
shipped fore and aft. That eagle-crowned helmet 
on the imperial head — with which we became ac- 
quainted through the pleasant pages of Punch, was 
the invention of a French painter, or rather military 
draughtsman, of whom the Czar was so fond that 
he could scarcely be prevailed upon to allow him to 
leave Russia, much less withdraw his silver roubles 
from the bank — was not adopted till eighteen-forty- 
six or seven. There is, almost equally, of course, a 
portrait of another Czar — the White Czar — for 
whom, though he was their enemy, the Russian 
people have a singular and almost superstitious ad- 
miration. The Malakani, or little wise men of 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 251 

JalmbofF, believed him, forty years since, to be the 
lion of the valley of Jehoshaphat, sent by Heaven to 
dethrone the false emperor, (the Malakani hold, like 
many others neither little nor wise, by the illegiti- 
macy of the 'Romanoffs.) There are many thou- 
sands, if not millions, of the common Russians, who 
believe to this day that the secret of the reverses sus- 
tained by the holy Russian arms in the Crimea (the 
reverses themselves, believe me, are, notwithstand- 
ing the lies of the Invalide Russe, no secret at home, 
for thousands of crippled soldiers have gone home 
to their villages to tell how soundly they were licked 
in the valley of the Tchernaya,) that the secrets of 
the defeats of Alma, and Inkermann and Balaclava, 
and the MalakhofF, was in the presence among the 
French hosts of the famous White Czar, miracu- 
lously resuscitated, and reigning at this very time 
over the Ivansotitskis in Paris-Gorod. One need 
not go so far as Volnoi-Volostchok to find a similar 
superstition. In the alpine departments of France 
there are plenty of peasants who believe that the 
astute gentleman who lives at the Tuileries (when 
he is at home, which is but seldom) is the self-same 
conqueror and king whose sweetest music was his 
horses' hoofs' notes as he galloped into conquered 
cities ; who vanquished at Marengo, and was crowned 
at Notre Dame, and saw Moscow blaze before his 
eyes like a pine torch ; and ran away from Waterloo, 
and died upon the rock ; and did the work of forty 
centuries in but fifty-two years of the Pyramids' 
brick life. 

The third picture, and the third whose presence 



252 A JOUENEY DUE NORTH. 

here is still a matter of course, (for the loyalty of 
the present must be satisfied as well as that of the 
past) is a portrait of the reigning Czar. His Alex-^ 
andrian majesty is represented in the act of review- 
ing his doughty and faithful Preobajinski Guards. 
The emperor and his guard are drawn upon about 
the same size of relative grandeur as Garagantua 
and his courtiers in the illustrations to Rabelais, by 
the incomparable M. Gustave Dore. The emperor, 
according to the laws of Brook Taylor's Perspective, 
(which, not being in the forty-five volumes of the 
Russian code, must, consequently, be held utterly 
heretical, schismatic, and abominable,) is about 
twenty-five feet high. The Preobajinskis are about 
two relative inches in stature, horses and all. The 
emperor is charging very fiercely over their heads ; he 
is waving a tremendous sword, and the plumes of 
his helmet are blowing to all the four points of the 
compass at once. His toes are manfully turned in, 
and his sinister thumb turned out, so that with his 
imperial head screwed a little obliquely, he looks not 
unlike Saint Nicholas in a field-marshal's uniform. 
Were the sword only a baton, an ecclesiastical Punch 
would be nearer the mark. The gallant Preoba- 
jinskis — or rather their horses — are all standing man- 
fully on their hind legs ; and the patriotic artist — a 
Moscow man — has artfully depicted their mouths 
all wide open, so as to leave you no room for doubt 
that they are crying " Long live the Czar I " as with 
one throat. There is a brilliant cortege of princes 
and generals behind the Czar ; and one of the grand- 
dukes — Constantine, I imagine — is holding an eye- 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 253 

glass like a transparent warming-pan, to his arch- 
ducal optic. I don't think that the Russian artist 
means to imply by this that his imperial highness is 
either short-sighted or affected ; but an eye-glass or 
lorgnottsz, is held to be a great sign of " civlation '* 
in Russia — almost as choice a specimen of the Per- 
sicos apparatus as a Moscow Madamsky, or French- 
milliner-made bonnet. 

One word about the Preobajinski Guards before I 
finish with number three. I have read lately that 
they form a regiment of men with cocked-up noses, 
and that every soldier of a certain height and with 
a nez retrousse is sent into this corps. This is one 
of the stock stories with which the witty and wily 
Russians cram foreigners who go about with open 
ears and note-books ; and they so cram them, I be- 
lieve, with a mischievous view to the said foreigners 
afterwards printing these cock-and-bull stories, and 
so making themselves ridiculous, and their testimony 
unworthy of credit. There are some eighty thou- 
sand men in the Russian Guards up to the Preoba- 
jinski standard height ; and I think I am giving an 
under estimate, when I say that forty thousand of 
them have cocked-up noses. It must be remembered 
that forty thousand Russian soldiers are as much 
alike as forty thousand peas, and that the cocked-up 
nose is the national nose. There is much truth, 
however, in the story, that great pains are taken in 
all the regiments of the Guards to match the men 
as much as possible in personal appearance by com- 
panies and battalions. Thus you will see the blue- 
eyed men filed together, the light-moustached men. 



254 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the blue-bearded men, the small-footed men, and so 
on ; but to send up all the tall men with cocked-up 
noses into the Preobajinski regiment would be very 
much like sending every Englishman who wears a 
white neckcloth to be waiter at the Bedford Hotel. 
Preobajinski means Transfiguration. The so-called 
Guards received their name from the Palace of Pre- 
obajinski, for whose defence they were first incor- 
porated, and which was a favourite residence of 
Peter the Great. 

With picture number four, I have done with this 
Volnoi Volotschok Louvre ; or more properly Na- 
tional Gallery of Art, for the fourth tableau is emi- 
nently national. The scene depicted is one of the 
episodes of the late war, in which the Russians were 
so signally and uniformly victorious. Scene, a Rus- 
sian church somewhere — very small and trim — a sort 
of holy front parlour filled with saints, and with 
striped curtains to the windows neatly festooned. 
Dramatis personce : a band of terrible Turks, with 
huge turbans and baggy breeches — -quite the March 
in Bluebeard Turks — the magnificent three-tailed 
bashaw Turks, not the sallow men with the tight 
coats and fezzes whom we are accustomed to. 
These ruthless Osmanlis have broken into the church, 
smashed the windows, pulled down the curtains, 
desecrated the altar, disfigured the saints, and mas- 
sacred the pope or priest, who, in full canonicals, 
with a murderous sword sticking up perpendicularly 
from his collar-bone, lies with his head in a tall can- 
dlestick, and his feet towards the door. But the 
miscreant pork-repudiators have reckoned without 



A COUNTKY HOUSE. 255 

their host. Behold the eleventh of the line — the 
Russian line — who have come to the rescue, and 
who turn the tables on the Turks in the most signal 
manner! Behold a whiskered Muscovite warrior, 
not dusting a Turk's jacket, but making eyelet holes 
in it with his good bayonet as the unbeliever tries to 
disfigure more saints. Behold another miserable 
Osmanli, his turban off, and his bare pate exposed, 
prostrate, and crying peccavi; suing for any infin- 
itesimal fraction of quarter, while a zealous grena- 
dier is rapidly sending him to perdition, by the 
favourite Russian process of dashing out his brains 
with the butt-end of his musket. Quarter, indeed ! 
I marvel much where it was, when the Turks dese- 
crated the church. Was it in the same part of Terra 
Incognita in which the English officer was beaten 
by a Russian market-woman for attempting to steal 
a goose, and in which fifteen Anglisky mariners and 
a captain rifled a moujik's house of a calf, a kakosh- 
nik, and fifteen pewter spoons — both favourite sub- 
jects of delineation with the Russians ? There are 
two little features of detail in this picture which I 
must mention, as they strike me as«being very curi- 
ous. Half-shattered on the floor of the church, there 
lies a large image of a black Virgin and Child — 
negro black, with thick lips. How came this, I 
wonder, into the Grseco- Sclavonic archaeology ? 
And the rays from the lighted candles are made to 
resemble the aureoles or golden glories round the 
heads of the saints, and are ornamented with in- 
tricate geometrical engine-turnings. Any one who 
watches the outward religious practices of the Rus- 



256 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

sians will be apt to consider them candle, if not fire 
worshippers ; so intimately are devotion and candle- 
grease mingled in their visible worship ; but be it as 
it may, the glory-headed candles strike me as being 
so pm-ely Byzantine, that I cannot refrain from rec- 
ommending them to the notice of the Pre-E/aphaelite 
brotherhood. I should very much like to see Mr. 
Dante R-osetti's notion of a dark lantern in that state 
of ornamentation. Whether the Russians eat can- 
dles or not is still a moot point ; but it is certain 
that vast numbers of the priests live upon candles. 
The subvention allowed them by the government is 
so miserably small, that, but from the revenue they 
derive from the sale of votive candles, many of them 
must inevitably starve. 

Saving these four pictures, and the saint's image, 
which last is the precious jewel in the head of this 
toad-like place, there is no other evidence of attempts 
to sacrifice to the graces, in the Starosta's house. 
Every other article of furniture is of the commonest, 
coarsest, rudest, wigwamest description. The rotten 
door swings on leathern hinges, or strips of raw hide 
rather, like that of the watch-tower. There is a 
table formed of two long fir planks resting upon 
massive tressels. There is a scanty square of dirty 
leather on it, which I presume serves as tablecloth, 
and on which our samovar now rests. This tressel- 
table has a most hideous resemblance to the high 
bench platform you see in a parish deadhouse ; and 
I am horrified by the coincidence, when Alexis tells 
me that when a man dies in these parts his corpse is 
laid on the table to be howled over, and that to say 



A COUNTKY HOUSE. 257 ' 

that " Ivan is on the table" is synonymous, in popu- 
lar parlance, with saying that Ivan is dead. I want 
to be off from the Starosta's house immediately after 
this ; but, Alexis (who is the laziest young cub be- 
tween here and Npookhopersk) won't hear of it, and 
says that the horses haven't had half enough rest 
yet ; so I continue my inventory. All round the 
Balschoi-Isba there runs a low wide bench, contrived 
a double debt to pay ; for the surplus members of 
the family, for whom there is no room in the family- 
vault bed, lounge on the bench by day, and .sleep on 
it by night. I wish I knew what there was in the 
churchwarden's pew behind the partition. More 
beds ? Alexis thinks, not. The Starosta's riches, 
perhaps. Will Alexis ask ? Alexis asks, or says 
that he does, and listens to a voluble explanation 
on the part of the Starosta, with a desperate attempt 
at an expression of wisdom in his large face ; but, 
when I ask him for a translation, he says it doesn't 
matter ; and I have a worse opinion of his Russ than 
ever. 

Alexis is sitting in a malformed Chinese puzzle 
on a large scale of timber, once painted green, and 
which was once, to the Starosta's great pride,-a gar- 
den chair belonging to the absentee, M. de Kato- 
richassoff. I, with my usual selfishness and disre- 
gard for the feelings of others, (I have the best 
teacup, too,) have usurped an old, long, low, dor- 
meuse fauteuil of gray Utrecht velvet, (the dearly- 
beloved furniture covering of the Russians — Vlours- 
ky, they call it, par excellence.,) which, from age and 
maltreatment, resembles in its black and tawny 



258 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

bundlings nothing half so much as the skin of an 
incorrigible old Tom, who has had rather a bad 
night of it on the tiles. Still, if the old chair had 
four legs instead of three, it would be a very com- 
fortable old chair. There are no other chairs, no 
other seats, save the bench, and that offered — if it 
be not too sacred a thing to sit down upon — by that 
vast chest of wood painted black, in the corner. 

This chest has a formidable iron hasp, and a pad- 
lock almost as big as a knocker, and is further braced 
with iron bands. It is also screwed to the floor, I 
have no doubt. It is the sort of chest that Sinbad 
the sailor might have taken with him on his voyages, 
or that the piratical merman in Washington Irving's 
delightful Knickerbockeriana might have floated 
away on in the storm. It is a chest that I should 
like to fill with dollars, and sprawl at full length 
upon till death came for change for a three-score- 
and-ten pound note. It is such a chest as might 
have served for the piece de resistance in the Misle- 
toe-bough tragedy — if this were a baron's hall in- 
stead of a Russian moujik's hut, and if a Russian 
baron's retainers were ever blithe and gay, or kept 
Christmas holiday. 

I suppose that in this chest the Starosta keeps his 
discharge from the army — he served fifty years since, 
and was at the Borodino — ^which he cannot read, 
but whose big black eagle he is never tired of ad- 
miring. Likewise, the Sonnik, or Russian Inter- 
preter of Dreams, coarsely printed at Kief on grey 
paper, and illustrated with glaring daubs, whose 
letterpress is likewise Chaldee to him, but which he 



A COUNTRY HOUSE. 259 

causes one of his son's wives who can read (she was 
a lady's maid once) to spell over to him occasionally. 
The interpretations do not stand him in very valua- 
ble stead, certainly, for he has generally forgotten 
the dreams themselves before he has vicarious re- 
course to the dream-book. Laid up within the 
recesses of this monstrous chest, not in lavender, 
but in a blue cotton pocket-handkerchief well im- 
pregnated with mahorka, is the Starosta's blue cloth 
caftan of state — a robe only worn on the most solemn 
and jubilatory occasions, such as one of the angel's 
visits (so few and far between are they) of the lord 
of the manor to his lands, or the great ecclesiastical 
fetes of the egg-eating Easter, and the peppermint 
brandy-moistened Assumption. This caftan is an 
ample robe, possibly of genuine indigo-dyed English 
broadcloth, which would be worth at Leeds or 
Bradford, its birthplace, perhaps fifty shillings ; but 
for which the Starosta has paid at the fair of Wish- 
noi- Woloschtchok (which you are not, by any means, 
to confound with my Volnoi) as much as one hun- 
dred roubles in paper assignations, or twenty-five in 
silver — a matter of four pounds English. There are 
real silver buttons to it, and it is lined with silk, and 
encircled by the gold and silver embroidered girdle 
which, carefully wrapped in tissue-paper, lies beside 
it'; it is a very swellish and dashing garment. His 
Starostaship's ordinary or work-a-day costume is a 
long loose coat of coarse gray frieze — very Irish in 
texture, though not in fashion ; and a bell-crowned 
hat — ^we have not yet seen it on his head, though — 
decidedly Irish, both in material and make. The 



260 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

sash is of gaudy colonrs, but of the coarsest cotton 
fabric : purchased at the Gostinnoi-dvor of Tver, 
most likely, and manufactured in the sham Man- 
chester mill of some seigneur anxious to increase his 
revenues by cotton lordism. Was there ever such 
a land of contradictions as this Muscovy ? Our 
heaven-born aristocracy, or at least their great ma- 
jority, think trade and manufactures derogatory to 
the pearls and velvet of their coronets. It is a 
standing joke with us that we have one peer of 
the realm who has so far forgotten his dignity as 
to be a coal-merchant, and another who is a tin- 
man. Yet the Russian aristocracy, incomparably 
the proudest in the world, do not think it a slur on 
their dignity to work cotton-factories, soap-boiling 
establishments, beetroot sugar-bakeries, candle man- 
ufactories, tanneries, paper-staining and floorcloth 
works, and iron-foundries. Imagine " Norfolk, West- 
minster, and Co., bone-boilers, Vauxhall, London I " 
In this trunk of suppositions the wealthy Starosta 
has — sing it, oh choir of Westminster Abbey! — ^three 
shirts of three different colours ; the red, white, and 
blue ; but he wears them not. No ; wary old man ! 
He keeps them against the day when Sophron, the 
oily drunkard shall be married, or some one or other 
of his numerous grandchildren shall enter into the 
wedded state. There is, actually and politically, a 
considerable infusion of communism in the rival in- 
stitutions of this incoherent nightmare country ; and, 
as regards garments, the doctrines of Messrs. Proud- 
hon and Robert Owen are astonishingly prevalent 
among the common people. The fable of the two 



A COUNTKY HOUSE. 261 

friends who had but one coat, hat, and addenda 
between them is realized here. Sons wear their 
father's shirts, and grandsires their grandson's hats. 
The socialism as regards boots is wonderful. The 
peasant lasses wear the peasant lads' boots habitu- 
ally (not as a task allotted to a subjugated sex, of 
wearing the new boots easy for the men -folk to walk 
in, but turn and turn about. If Vacil be at home, 
Tatiana goes to the fields in Vacil's upper leathers, 
and vice versa.) Very frequently there are but two 
pair of boots to a very numerous family, and great 
economy is necessarily observed in wearing them. 
You may often see, even ^ in the suburbs of Peters- 
burg and Moscow, gangs of peasant girls and young 
men returning from the day's work, the comeliest 
and strongest wearing their family boots, the others 
shod either with the ordinary lapti, or bark-basket 
shoes, or going altogether barefoot. If it be rainy 
weather, the much-prized family boots are carried 
slung crosswise over the shoulders. No Vacil or 
Tatiana dare, fqr his or her life, run the risk of in- 
juring the paternal slippers by contact with mud or 
water. The result, on the return to the paternal 
hovel, would be such a fearful application of leather 
— not boot leather, but of a thinner and more flex- 
ible description, and not to the feet, as would cause 
Vacil to howl, and Tatiana to cry her not very hand- 
some eyes out. A bran new pair of boots are to a 
Russian a prize of infinite value. I have seen a 
Moujik, or. an Ischvostchik, who has been able to 
treat himself to such a luxury, for the first time in 
two years, perhaps, lying on a bench, or— and this 



262 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

is just as likely — on the ground, with his new booted 
legs raised high above his head against a wall, con- 
templating their newness, toughness, and thickness, 
and inhaling their villanous odour with the half- 
drowsy, half-delirious mansuetude of an opium-eater 
of the Theriarki-Tcharchi, over his fifth pipe. 

The Starosta must have a fur robe, too, in this 
chest; as well as those filthy sheepskins which lie 
on the top of the stove. It must be a foxskin schou- 
ba ; or, perhaps, a brown-bearskin, originally the prop- 
erty, of a very grisly customer of that ilk, shot in a 
Carelian forest, by one of his sons while on a hunt- 
ing excursion with his noble Barynn, and which he, 
having been miserably hugged, clawed, and mangled 
in the ursine strife, was graciously allowed to keep. 
And, finally, in this chest of chests, there is a leath- 
ern bag full of copper copecks, and odd pieces of the 
strangest and most ancient cgins the Starosta has 
been able, in the course of a long lifetime, to collect. 
The Russians, high and low, have a curious and de- 
cided turn for numismatics. There is scarcely a 
gentleman of any pretensions to taste, who does not 
possess something like a cabinet of rare and antique 
coins and medals; and I have seen in some mer- 
chant's leather-bag collections, such weird, barbaric, 
dark age moneys and tokens, as would make the 
eyes of the curators of our museums to twinkle, and 
their mouths to water. 

This is the house of the Starosta. After all, I 
might have given a very lucid idea of a Russian 
peasant's house, by repeating a succinct description 
given me by a certain young Russian, soon after my 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 263 

arrival in St. Petersburg. " A moujik's house," he 
said, " is dark, and made of wood ; the floor is gray ; 
the walls are gray, and the roof is gray ; you 'can 
cut the smell of oily fish and cabbage-soup with a 
hatchet, and at night you can hear the bugs bark." 
( Vous entendrez ahoyer les punaises.) 



XII. 

RUSSIANS AT HOME. 

This is the order of afternoon — June the month, 
and two hours past meridian the time; Do you 
never please yourself in striving to imagine what 
people are doing thousands of miles away at such 
and such an exact moment ? It must be merry this 
golden June season in gay Sherwood. Bold Robin 
Hood has thrown his crossbow by, and feels quite 
honest, though somewhat a-dry, and is gone to drain 
a flagon of the best, in the leafiest glade of the wood 
with that >Friar, who is always thirsty. Will Scar- 
lett is determined that his nose shall vie in hue with 
his name, and is toasting jolly June in the sunshine 
with Allen-a-Dale, who has got his rebec in fine 
tune, and carols to it till the birds grow jealous, and 
think him a very over-rated performer. Midge the 
Miller is indubitably singing with the best of them, 
for Midge, though the careful Percy has somehow 



264 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

overlooked the inference, was evidently a Cheshire 
man, and resided on the banks of the Kiver Dee, 
where who so jolly as he ? As for Little John, at 
most times rather a satm'nine and vindictive outlaw, 
inciting the dishonest but peaceable Robin to cut 
off the heads of bishops and pitch them into their 
graves, in addition to rifling them of their mitres 
and pastoral rings — Little John is laughing very 
heartily, in his own misanthropical manner, to think 
that it is June, and fine weather, and that it will 
soon be the height of the season for pilgrimages to 
the wealthy shrines ; and Maid Marian — what 
should or could she be doing in her bower, but 
weaving many-coloured chaplets and garlands, and 
singing songs about summer and the roses in June ? 
So all is merry this June day in my imaginary 
Sherwood, and in many other real and tangible 
localities and living hearts my fancy could paint at 
this moment, far, far away. This is a merry time, 
I am sure, for some scores of gauzy bonnets with 
pretty faces behind them ; for hampers with many 
bottles containing something else besides salad mix- 
ture ; for steamboat decks, for pic-nic turfs, for Ken- 
ilworth and Netley ruins, for the bow-window at the 
Trafalgar, for eight hours at the seaside, for excur- 
sion vans, for Sunday-school festivals with their 
many flags and monstrous tea-drinkings ; for the 
^lan with the trombone, and the gipsies at Nor- 
wood and the Saint Sebastianzed artillery man at 
chalky Rosherville ; for the solemn chestnut trees 
and timid deer of Bushey, and the pert pagoda and 
shaven lawns of Cremorne ; for many thousand 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 265 

happy men and women and children, who are dis- 
porting themselves in God's good summer season. 
I cannot linger further on the delights which mirth 
can give ; but I sum them all up in a presumed 
Sherwood, and the assumption that it is very merry 
there. But, I am compelled to confess mournfully, 
also, that the genuine merriment I can recall is on 
the wrong side of fifteen hundred miles away, and 
that it is the very reverse of merry in the month of 
June in the village of Volno'i Voloschtchok. 

Merry! Imagine the merriment of a Cagot vil- 
lage in Beam in the middle of the Middle Ages ; 
imagine the joviality of the Diamond in Derry, 
before Kirke's ships broke through the Boom. Im- 
agine the conviviality of a select party of Jews 
beleaguered in the castle of York, with the king's 
surgeon dentists, to the number of some thousands, 
outside. Imagine the enjoyment of a Rabelais 
bound to board and lodge with a John Calvin. I 
think any of these reunions would surpass, in out- 
side gayety at least, the cheerfulness of a Russian 
Sloboda, and of the Russians at home therein. 
Alexis Hardshellovitch and I emerge from the Star- 
osta's house, and wander up and down the longitud- 
inal gap between the houses, which may, by an 
extreme stretch of courtesy, be called the main 
street. I may here mention that the street, regarded 
as a thoroughfare, is as yet imperfectly understood 
in Russia. The monstrous perspectives of St. 
Petersburg have few imitations in the provinces. 
There are even traces remaining in modern Moscow 
of the circular streets of the Wend villages; some 

12 



266 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

of which yet remain in the Alt mark, and in the 
province of Luneborg in Germany, and are com- 
mon in the purely Sclavonic parts of Russia. The 
houses are jostled one against the other in a circle, 
more or less regular, and there is but one opening for 
ingress or egress. The cause of this peculiar form 
of construction is doubtless to be traced to the old 
Ishmaelitish times, when every village's hand was 
against its neighbour. In many of the Russian gov- 
ernments there are still villages consisting of a single 
street, closed at one extremity, resembling what in' 
western cities is termed a blind alley. I feel a den- 
sity of dulness and mental melancholy settling on 
me in such a place ; the houses begin to look like 
cellular vans ; the few trees like gibbets ; the birds — 
the human ones I mean — like gaol-birds ; the whole 
place seems plague-stricken, or panic-stricken, or 
famine-stricken, or all three at once. 

As for " Life," social acceptation of the term, there 
is not a pinch of it in the whole gray snuff-box of a 
hamlet. I am not difficult to please as to villages. 
I don't expect to find green lanes, trim hedges, ivy- 
grown churches, smiling cottages, rosy children, 
ponds with ducks, and cows, and sheep, looking as 
though they had been washed and spruced up for 
the especial benefit of Mr. Sidney Cooper, E.. A,, 
who had sent word he was coming. I don't expect 
these things, as a matter of course, anywhere but in 
an English village. I have seen some of the dullest, 
dreariest, ugliest villages under the sun in France 
and Germany and Belgium. The clean village of 
Brock is not so clean as it is, and much more hide- 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 267 

ous than it might be ; and I am given to understand 
that an American " Shaker " village is calculated, for 
gloominess in aspect and deficiency in the pictur- 
esque, to " whop all creation" quite hollow. Still I am 
inclined to think that a village peopled by primitive 
Puritans, who had espoused the deceased wives' 
sisters' husbands' wives of Mormon elders, and had 
afterwards been converted to the Shaker way of 
thinking, must be a community of roaring prodigals 
compared to the inhabitants of Volnoi. 

Beyond the watchtower, there is not one building 
to 'give individuality to the village, or any sign of 
communal organization. The Starosta's house is 
two or three sizes larger than its fellows ; the only 
other hut that may be called a public building is the 
granary, which is a barn of considerable size ; but 
houses and barns are all alike — all littered at one far- 
row by one inexorable gray, dull, dingy, timber-bris- 
tled sow. The very poorest moujik's house is the 
diminished counterpart of the reputedly wealthy 
Starosta's dwelling. There is nowhere any sign of 
the humblest decoration, the feeblest attempt at porch 
or summer-house building, or parasitical shrub-train- 
ing, or painting, or whitewashing, or even paling- 
pitching. There is not a bench before a door ; but 
it must be admitted that over each doorway there is 
a rough fir board, on which is branded rather than 
painted, in red and white, the rudest resemblance of 
a bucket, a hatchet, a saw, a ladder, a coil of ropes, 
and similar implements. These Egypto- Cherokee 
implements mean that the dwellers in the doorways, 
are respectively bucket-men, hatchet-men, saw-men, 



268 A J.OURNEY X>UE NORTH. 

and so forth ; add that, in case of fire, they are bound 
to provide those implements, and to do suit and ser- 
vice with them to their Barynn towards the extinc- 
tion of the conflagration. If I want to see cottage 
porches and trailing plants, Alexis tells me I must go 
to Ekaterinoslaf, some hundreds of versts off, or to 
the (said to be) smiling villages in the governments 
of Koursk and Woronesch. If I want to see peas- 
ants' dwellings otherwise than in the interminable 
gray garb, I must visit the Slobodas of wealthy and 
puissant seigneurs — the Orloffs, Demidoffs, and 
TcheremetiefFs, where the houses are painted in all 
the colours of the rainbow ; where the Starosta's 
house has a garden before and a garden behind ; and 
where there is positively a church whose timbered 
sides are painted without, and plastered within, and 
whose dome and cupolas are daubed the brightest 
blue, and bespangled with stars in burnished copper. 
Not this for Volno'i. Here all is gray ; yet it is far 
from the sort of place where Beranger's Merry little 
gray fat man would elect to take up his abode. 
Road, and palings, and scant herbage, and stones, 
and houses are all of the exact tint of modellers' 
clay. One longs not for the darling green of Eng- 
lish scenery, for that is hopeless and unattainable, 
but for even the yellow smeared houses of eastern 
towns, or the staring white of French villages. 
There is but one variation in hue, — far up above 
where the sun dwells ; and there it is indeed a hot 
and copper sky, and the sun at noon is bloody. 
But the great master of light and shade disdains to 
throw Volnoi into chiaro-oscuro. He will parch 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 269 

and wither, and blaze up its surface with a uni- 
formly-spread blast of burning marl ; but he will 
give it no dark corners, no chequered lights — no 
Rembrandt groves of rich brown — no Ostade dia- 
mond touches of pearly brilliancy. 

There is so deep rooted a want of confidence in 
the quicksand-like soil of Russia on the part of the 
dwellers in towns, as well as those who abide in the 
country, that the foundations of the houses reach 
far above the earth. In St. Petersburg, indeed, the 
basement of every house is vaulted, like the bullion 
offices at the Bank of England. But in villages 
such as this, precautions have been taken to prevent 
the poor timber house being blown away, or tum- 
bling to pieces, or falling head over heels, or sinking 
right through the rotten earth, and coming out at the 
antipodes. By a species of compromise between the 
dog-kennel, the hen-roost, and the pigeon-cote styles 
of architecture, the houses are themselves perched 
upon blocks of granite, a material common enough 
in this country, and admirably suited to the , sculp- 
ture of monoliths to great men, were there any great 
men in it to raise monoliths to. En attendant^ they 
raise statues to the rascals. There is naturally be- 
tween the planks of the ground-floor, and the ague- 
steeped, malaria-emitting marshy ground beneath, a 
space some fourteen inches in height, and this space 
is a hothouse for foul weeds, a glory-hole for name- 
less filth and rubbish, and a perpetually fresh field 
and pasture new for saurian reptiles and elephant- 
ine vermin. The houses forming the oulitza, or 
street, are not contiguous. They are detached villa 



270 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

residences, with irregular intervals, offering prospects 
of gray dust-heaps and copper sky. But with not 
so much as a clothes-pole which a Jonah could sit 
under with the hope that he might be overshadowed 
by a gourd in the morning. 

No shops. Shops are a feature of village life not 
yet understood in a Russian sloboda. Even in gov- 
ernment towns of some pretensions — even in the Go- 
rods — where there are two or three churches to every 
hundred inhabitants — shops for the sale of the com- 
monest necessaries of life are wofully scanty in 
number. There are some houses (in the towns) 
where bread is sold ; and in the meanest villages 
there is the usual and inevitable quota of govern- 
ment dram-shops ; but for every other article of mer- 
chandise,— -whether you desire to purchase it whole- 
sale or retail, — you must go, as in a Turkish town 
in Asia Minor, or in a Hindostanee cantonment, to 
the bazaar, which is in a Gostinnoi-dvor on the 
smallest, seediest, rag-shoppish scale, but called by 
the same high-sounding name, and which is as 
much the centre of sale and barter transactions, as 
though it were either one of the stately edifices in 
which the buyers and sellers of St. Petersburg the 
heathen, and Moscow the holy, spend or gain their 
millions of roubles. There is no Gostinnoi-dvor, 
of course, in such petty villegiaturas as Volnoi, and 
the happy villagers effect their little marketings in 
this wise. The major proportion of the poor food 
they eat, they produce themselves. The coarse 
grain they and their cattle fodder on is either gar- 
nered in their own bins behind their own hovels, or 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 271 

is drawn, under certain restrictions, and in stated 
rations — (in times of scarcity) — from the common 
granary. Though small their village home, the Im- 
perial Government, in its wisdom and mercy, and 
bent on comforting its people, has thrown the ill- 
boding shadow of its eagle wings over a noisome 
shebeen of a vodki-larka, or grog-shop, where, on 
high days and holidays, the children of the Czar 
may drink themselves as drunk as soot, without fear 
of punishment ; and where, on non-red letter days, 
they get drunk with no permission at all — and are 
duly sobered by the stick afterwards. For raiment, 
the women weave some coarse fabric for common 
wear, and spin some sailcloth-like linen ; as for caK- 
coes and holiday garments, the Starosta and the 
Bourmister are good enough to make that little 
matter right for the people between them. They 
clothe the naked, for a consideration, and in their 
beneficence take payment in the smallest instal-. 
ments for the goods supplied; but woe to the 
moujik or the baba who is behindhand in his or her 
little payments to those inexorable tallymen. 

For, the chief prop or basis of the municipal au- 
thority is, of course, the Holy Stick ; whose glori- 
ous, pious, and immortal memory will, no doubt, be 
drunk by K-ussian tories of the old school, and with 
nine times nine, a century hence. As I intend here- 
after to speak of the H. S. in its institutional point 
of view, and to show that, like the tchinn, it has a 
pyramidal and mutually cohering and supporting 
formation ; I have only to hint, in this place, that 
the happy villagers get an intolerable amount of it, 



272 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

both from the Bourmister and the Starosta. The 
Bourmister is the great judge — Minos, Rhadaman- 
thus, and ^acus combined — under the Pluto of this 
Tartarus, the absent M. de Katerichassoff. The 
Bourmister has power to order his adjoint the Star- 
osta, for all his long beard and venerable aspect, to 
undergo the discipline of the stick ; he has the 
power to order the Starosta's great-grandmother to 
be flogged, were it possible for that old lady to be 
alive. The young men of the village, the young 
maidens thereof, the children, and the idiots, and the 
sick people, can all at the word of command from 
the north German intendant, be lashed like hounds ; 
or, at his pleasure, he can send them — ^thirty miles' 
distance, if he chooses — ^to a police station, with a 
little note to the nadziratelle or polizie-kapitan ; 
which note is at once honoured by that functionary, 
who takes care that, as far as there is any virtue in 
the battogues or split-canes, the person entitled to 
receive the amount of toco for which the bill is good, 
shall have no cause to complain of the police rate of 
discount. Discount ! the generous nadziratelle will 
oft-times give the moujik an odd dozen for luck. 

The Bourmister's authority, then, is almost as 
awful and irresponsible as that of the captain of a 
man-of-war thirty years ago, (the nearest approach 
to the Grand Seigneur I can think of,) and he can 
order the gratings to be rigged, and the hands to be 
turned up for punishment, whenever things are not 
going shipshape, or he is out of temper. The 
-Starosta more closely resembles the boatswain. He 
has no special authority, under the articles of war, 



\ 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 273 

to beat, but he does most consumedly. The Bour- 
mister can cause any slave man or woman to be 
stripped, tied up, and flogged ; but he does it ofii- 
cially, and with a grim mocking semblance of exe- 
cuting justice. The Starosta kicks, cudgels, punches, 
and slaps — not officially, but officiously. The one 
state of things resembles the punishment inflicted 
by Dr. Broomback, the schoolmaster, — the other, the 
thrashing administered by the fourth-form boy to his 
fag. But there is not much to choose between the 
two inflictions, as far as the amount of pain suffered. 
The dorsal muscles are as easily contused by the 
bully-boy's hockey-stick as by the schoolmaster's 
cane ; and a whip, as long as it is a whip, will hurt 
whether it be wielded by a police-corporal, or by a 
brutal peasant. 

Among a people so constantly beaten as are the 
Russians, it would naturally be expected that when- 
ever the beaten had the power, they would become 
themselves the beaters, and that their wives and 
children, their cattle and domestic animals would 
lead a terrible time of it. This is not the case. 
Haxthausen, with an apologetic shrug for the abom"- 
inations of the stick regime^ says, " Tout le monde 
donne des coups en Russie," and goes on to say 
that, the father beats his son, the husband his wife, 
the mother her daughter, the child his playfellow, 
and so forth. I am thoroughly disinclined to be- 
lieve this. From all I have seen of the common 
people, they appear to treat each other with kind- 
ness and forbearance. A father may occasionally 
pitch into his drunken son ; but the Russians at 

12* 



V 



274 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

home are far removed from being systematically 
violent and cruel. There is this one grand protec- 
tion to the married ladies, that the Russian husband 
when drunk, is, instead of a tiger, the most innocent 
of ba-a lambs. It never by any chance occurs to 
him to jump upon the wife of his bosom, or to 
knock her teeth down her throat, or to kneet on her 
chest, or to chastise her with a poker. When most 
drunk he is most affectionate. We have all of us 
heard the stock Russian story, stating it to be the 
custom for a Russian bride to present her future 
lord and master with a whip on the wedding-day, 
and to be afterwards known to express discontent if 
her husband was lax in the exercise of the thong on 
her marital shoulders. Such an event, I have good 
reason to believe, is as common in Russia as is the 
sale of a wife in Smithfield, and with a halter round 
her neck, among us in England. Yet Muscovite 
husbands will lie quite as long under the imputation 
of wife-whipping as the English husbands do under 
the stigma of wife-selling, and as unjustly. In this 
case the saddle is placed on exactly the wrong horse. 
A Russian peasant has really no objection to sell 
his wife ; and for a schtoff or demi-John of vodki 
will part with his Tatiana or Ekaterina cheerfully. 
The Englishman will not barter away his moiety, 
but he keeps her, and bruises her. To their horses 
and cattle the Russians are singularly merciful, pre- 
ferring far more to drive them by kind words than 
by blows. In general, too, the women seem to 
treat the babies and little children with all desirable 
kindness and affection ; the only exceptional case I 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 275 

can recall was narrated to me by a Russian gentle- 
man, who told me that in some villages of the gov- 
ernment of TchernigofF there was a perfect epidemic 
among the women (only) for beating their children ; 
and that they were in the habit of treating them 
with such ferocious brutality, that the severest pun- 
ishments had to be applied to the unnatural parents, 
and in many cases the children had to be separated 
from them. I must state, to whichever point of the 
argument it may tend, that my informant was him- 
self a slave-owner; and I am the more bound to 
make the statement, because I have frequently heard 
similar stories of the almost inexpressible cruelties 
of slave-mothers to their children, from slave-owners 
from the southern states of America. It is a curious 
circumstance, although quite foreign to the analogy 
sought to be here conveyed, that the village of L'Es- 
tague, near Marseilles, which was originally colon- 
ized in the old Roman times, bears at this day a 
precisely identical disreputation for the cruelty of 
the mothers towards the children. 

The picture of a Russian village and Russians at 
home, without a portrait of the institution which 
serves the Muscovite moujik for inglenook, cooking- 
rarige, summer siesta-place, winter bed, wardrobe, 
gossiping-place, and almost sole comfort and allevi- 
ator of misery — the Peetch, or stove — would be an 
imposture. I want the limner's and wood-engraver's 
aid here, desperately ; but, failing that, I must go to 
my old trade of paper-staining, and word-stencilling, 
and do my best to draw the peetch with movable 
types and printer's ink. 



276 A JOUENEY DUE NORTH. 

The Russian aristocratic stove, white, sculptured, 
monumental, gigantic, is like the sepulchre of some 
great man in an abbey, which has been newly re- 
stored and beautified. The Russian popular — I 
dare not for my ears' sake say democratic — stove is, 
without, wondrously like an English parish church 
with a flat roof. And the model is not on' so very 
small a scale either ; for I have seen stoves in Rus- 
sian houses, which, as a Shetland pony is to a Bar- 
clay and Perkins' Entire horse, might be compared 
in magnitude to that smallest of parish churches — 
St. Lawrence's in the Isle of Wight. The stove, 
like the church, has a square tower, on whose turret 
pigeons coo ; a choir and aisles, a porch and vestry. 
It is a blind church, having no windows ; but it has 
plenty of doors, and it has vaults beneath its base- 
ment, where unsightly bodies do lie. The stove 
stands sometimes boldly in the middle of the princi- 
pal apartment, as a church should do in the centre 
of its parish ; sometimes it is relegated against one 
of the walls, three parts of whose entire side it 
occupies. The stove has a smoke-pipe, through 
which the fumes of the incandescent fuel pass (but 
not necessarily) into a chimney, and out of a chim- 
ney-pot. But anywhere out of the house is thought 
quite sufficient, and the chimney-pot may be up- 
stairs or down-stairs, or in my lady's chamber, so 
long as the smoke has a partial outlet somewhere. 
I say partial, for smoke has odd ways of curling up 
and permeating through old nooks and corners, and 
pervading the house generally. It comes up through 
chinks of the floor in little spirals ; it frays in um- 



^KUSSIANS AT HOME. 277 

brella-like gasts from the roof-tree ; it meets you at 
the door, and looks out. of the window ; so that you 
can seldom divest yourself of the suspicion that there 
must be something smouldering somewhere which 
will blaze out shortly — which there frequently is, and 
does. Now for the peetch in its entirety. Keep the 
ecclesiastical image strongly in your mind ; for here 
is the high square tower, and there the long-bodied 
choir and aisles. But you are to remember that the 
peetch is composed of two separate parts of separ- 
ate nationalities. The long body is simply the old 
Russian stove — a hot sarcophagus — a brick coffin 
with fire matter within, like that of a dead man 
who burns before his time. This simple brick vault 
full of combustion, dates from the earliest period of 
authentic Muscovite research. It is the very same 
stove that was used in the days of E-urik, and the 
Patriarch Nikon, and Fedor-Borissovitch. It is the 
very same stove, that the most savage of savage 
tribes would almost intuitively construct, — a hole 
dug in the ground, a framework of branches, the 
food and fuel placed upon it, and the whole covered 
in with a roof of boughs and clay plastered over it. 
Not that boughs, or branches, or wet clay, enter into 
the architecture of the actual Russian stove ; but 
the principle is the same. And I am not covertly 
insisting on the barbarism of the Russian people 
because their stove is so simple. What is our 
famous and boasted Register Stove, or Rippon and 
Burton's improved grate, but a hole in the wall, 
with a fire-receiver uniting the capacities of an 
elliptical St. Lawrence's gridiron and a distorted 



278 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

birdcage ? "What is the French fireplace but a 
yawning cavern, with logs on dogs, in the most 
primitive style of adjustment ? What is the French 
poele, or stove, but a column of St. Simeon Stylites, 
with a pedestal rather too hot for the feet of the 
saint, and an iron tail curling the wrong way? 
What is the Belgian stove, which advances so im- 
pertinently into the very middle of your chamber, 
but a lady's work-table in cast-iron, and with bandy 
legs ? What is the German stove but a species of 
hot-pump, insufferably conceited and arrogant — 
turning up its white porcelain nose in a corner of 
the room, and burning timber living, I may so call 
it, at the rate of two Prussian dollars a day? 
There is, indeed, a stove I love ; a fireplace, which 
combines mental improvement and instruction with 
the advantages of physical warmth and light. This 
is the fireplace whose sides are lined with the old 
Dutch tiles. In glorious blue and white, there were 
on these tiles depicted good and moving histories. 
Joseph was sold to his brethren on these tiles ; An- 
anias Came to a bad end, together with his wife 
Sapphira, for saying the thing that was not ; the 
Good Samaritan left a cerulean twopence at a 
smoke-dried inn ; and jolly Squire Boaz met Ruth 
a-gleaning, and at once inspired a Hebrew poet to 
write the most charming pastoral in the world, and 
inspired an Irish copyist to compose the libretto of 
the opera of " Rosina." There are no fire-places 
with Dutch tiles now. I have been in Holland ; 
and, in their rooms, they have register stoves, and 
Simeon Stylites' columns. I can forgive almost 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 279 

that Dutch-built King of England who threw our 
Art back half a century — I mean William the 
Third — who spoilt the Tower of London, intro- 
duced the cat-o'-nine-tails into the English navy, 
would never go to the theatre, and wouldn't let his 
gentle wife have any green peas, for the one and 
simple fact that it was in his reign that fireplaces 
with Dutch tile-linings became common in England. 
From these fire-places, with their w^hite and blue 
Scripture stories, little Philip Doddridge and little 
Sam Wesley learnt, at their mother's knees, lessons 
of truth and love and mercy. There are no Dod- 
dridges and Wesleys to expound to us now. Dod- 
dridge is a dean with two thousand a year, busily 
occupied in editing Confucius and defending bad 
smells ; and Wesley is a clown who sings a sacred 
Tippety witch et in a music-hall where people are 
killed. Least of all I am entitled to accuse the 
Russians of uncivilization in their stone building, 
seeing that their method of keeping the burning 
game alive is nearly identical with the process 
adopted by the shepherds on the melancholy downs 
of Hampshire and Sussex. The Cory don with the 
crook, and with the ragged smock-frock and the 
eight shillings a week, takes Monsieur Hedgehog, 
covers him up with clay — how Russian I sticks him 
in a hole in the ground, which he fills up with fire, 
and then covers that up with clay and turf again ; 
and capital eating — hot, succulent, and gravy-yield- 
ing, is this same Signor Hedgehog, when you dig 
him out of the clay again. Such a hedgehog din- 
ner with a shepherd on a lonely down, a wise dog 



280 ' A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

sitting about two yards off, now sniffing the hot 
regale, and sententioiisly anticipatory of bones and 
fragments, now wriggling that sapient nozzle of his 
in the ambient air as if his scent were seven-league 
reaching, and he could smell out mutton misbehav- 
ing itself miles off, now casting a watchful back- 
handed eye — I mean, by the misnomer, when the 
optic is cast back by a half-upwards, half-sideways 
jerk of the head — upon the silly sheep — silly enough 
to eat their perpetual salad without asking for Doc- 
tor Kitchener's mixture ; silly enough to be made 
into continual chops without remembering that there 
is many a ram who is more than a match for a man. 
Such a noontide meal — a gray sky above, and a 
neutral tint in the perspective, discreet silence dur- 
ing the repast, monosyllabic conversation and a 
short pipe afterwards — is a most philosophical and 
instructive entertainment. The edge is rather taken 
off the Aristotelian aspect of the encounter when 
the shepherd, like the needy knife-grinder, asks you 
for sixpence for a pot of beer, to drink your honour's 
health in. 

On the long body of the stove, the Russian peas- 
ant dozes in summer, and sleeps without disguise in 
winter. When his miserable life is over they lay 
him out — that is, they pull his legs, and try to un- 
crisp his fingers, and tie his jaw up with a stocking, 
and put a copeck on each eyelid, and press a painted 
image to his senseless lip, and place an iron trencher, 
with bread and salt on it, on his breast, and don't 
wash him — on the stove ; if there happens to be a 
scarcity of tables in the mansion. On the top of 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 281 

the stove the mother makes her elder children hold 
down her younger children to be beaten — it is almost 
as convenient for that purpose as the bench in the 
yard of a police-gaol ; on the top Of the stove, Ivan 
Ivanovitch and Dmitri Djorjevitch lean on their 
elbows with beakers of quass, and saucers full of 
salted cucumbers between, disputing over knavish 
bargains, making abstruse calculations upon their 
rnky-nailed fingers with much quickness, taking the 
name of their Lord in vain to prove the verity of 
assertions to which Barabbas is one party and Judas 
the other ; and ultimately interchanging dirty rags 
of rouble notes, with grins and shrugs, and spittings 
and crossings. I have previously had occasion to 
remark that the only test exercised by the unedu- 
cated Russians, as regards the value of a bank-note, 
is in its colour. The fifty rouble note is gray ; the 
twenty-five rouble note is violet ; the ten ditto, red ; 
the five ditto, blue ; the three ditto, green ; lastly, 
the one rouble note is a yellowish brown. You fre- 
quently hear a moujik say, " I earned a blue yester- 
day ; " " he has stolen a red ; " " he lost a brown," 
&c. A monetary dispute between two Russians 
frequently concludes by the disputants embracing 
and mutually treating each other to liquor ; in such 
a case, you may be perfectly certain that both par- 
ties — A and B — have made a good thing of it ; but 
that some third party, not present, — say C — has 
been most awfully robbed, swindled, and cozened 
in the transaction. On the flat roof of the stove, 
finally, the Russian peasant is supposed to pass the 
only happy period of his life — that of his dozing 



282 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

slumbers. And it is positively — I have heard it from 
all sorts of differently actuated informants, hundreds 
of times — a standard and deeply rooted impression 
or superstition with the moujik, call it which you 
will, that while he is in dreamland, he really walks 
and talks, and eats and drinks, and loves, and is 
free, and enjoys himself; and that his waking life — 
the life in which he is kicked, and pinched, and flog- 
ged, and not paid — is only an ugly nightmare, 
which God in his mercy will dispel some day. 

Rashly have I said that the top of the stove is the 
only place (saving the vodki shop ; that exception is 
always to be assumed) where the Russian peasant 
can enjoy himself. At the bottom of the peetch, 
likewise, can he enjoy the dulce desipere in loco. 
For, as between the floor of the outer house itself 
and our mother earth there is an open basement, or 
glory hole, so between the bottom of the stove and 
the flooring there is also a longitudinal cavity ; some 
fourteen inches high, perhaps, and some five feet 
and a half long ; the depth, of course, corresponding 
to that of the peetch, which is ordinarily about forty 
inches wide at the top. Within this cavity, on ordi- 
nary days, odd matters are thrust — immondices of 
every description, broomsticks, buckets, and coils of 
rope. It is the sort of cavity where ravens might 
establish a joint-stock bank for savings, and rob each 
other, as dkectors and shareholders, dreadfully. I 
have passed over the standing armies of vermin, 
who — if it be not inconsistent to say so — ^lie there 
armed cap-d-pie. But once a week, Ivan Ivano* 
vitch, the moujik, having divested himself of every 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 283 

article of clothing, crawls into this longitudinal cav- 
ity, and there lies till he is half-sufFocated. On 
emerging from this oven, the Baba Tatiana, his 
wife, douses him with pails of hot water, till he is 
half-drowned. He speedily reenters into his clothes, 
which have been neatly baking in the front part of 
the stove, to kill the vermin ; and this is the Russian 
bath. If the fortunate moujik be a starosta, or at 
all removed from the usual abject poverty, he will 
have, in lieu of this, a sort of hot-brick kennel built 
in his backyard, by the side of his pigstye and his 
dung and dust heap ; and this, with a small ante- 
chamber for dousing purposes, forms his vapour- 
bath. The hole under the stove, however, and the 
hot-water pail afterwards, with a bucket of nice cold 
water occasionally, are the most popular compo- 
nents of a Ruski banyi, or Russian bath. Baking 
wearing apparel, in order to divest it of its animated 
lining, was, I was inclined to think before I visited 
Russia, a device confined to our English gaols and 
houses of correction. The first intimation I had of 
the practice being to the manner born in Muscovy, 
was apropos of a tea-party. The lady of the house 
where I was fortunate enough to receive that pleas- 
ant hospitality, had sent her little boy out for some 
tea-cakes ; and as the Russian high-priced flour is 
the best in the world, and the Esthonian and Livo- 
nian bakers, who almost monopolize the baking 
trade in St. Petersburg, are most cunning in their 
art, the substitutes for Sally Lunns are delicious. 
The little boy came back betimes with a bag of tea- 
cakes, and a very pale and frightened face, and being 



284 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

questioned, 'said that he had wandered, through curi- 
osity, into the bakehouse, and that there w^s a 
man's head in the oven. He was sure it was a 
head, he reiterated, because he wore a hat. Where- 
upon a Russian gentleman who was present burst 
out into loud laughter, and deigned to explain to us 
that, among us gens du peuple it was a common 
custom to send a hat to the baker's when the little 
animals signifying love, who boarded and lodged 
within it, became too troublesome. I know that the 
horrible story spoilt my appetite for Sally Lunns 
that evening, and my tea too, though it was of the 
very best — from Poudachoff 's, and cost eight roubles 
a pound. 

Now for a word concerning the square church- 
tower. This is called the Poele Hollandaise or Am- 
sterdam stove, and was brought from the land of 
dykes and dams by the all-observant Peter the Great, 
Breast high in this Amsterdam stove, is the ordinary 
continental' cooking apparatus, with circular cavities 
for the saucepans and bainmari pans, should he 
happen to possess any. Underneath, at about six 
inches height from the ground, is the range of family 
vaults; a longitudinal tunnel extending the entire 
length of the stove, and heating the whole fabric. 
This is filled, every other day or so, with logs of 
timber, chopped to about the size of an English con- 
stable's police baton. The apertures of the stove 
are left open until this fuel attains a thoroughly red 
heat, and no more gas can be emitted ; all is then 
carefully closed up. The stove is, in fact, nothing 
but a brick brazier of charcoal; but I am almost 



KUSSIANS AT HOME. 285 

willing to believe, as the Russians proudly boast, 
that, they have some peculiar art and secret in the 
construction of stoves; for I have never heard of 
any cases of asphyxia through their use. The sam- 
ovar, too, which is apparently a most deadly piece 
of copper-smithery, is usually found to be innox- 
ious ; though I cannot help thinking that either a 
Russian stove or a Russian tea-urn would very soon 
make cold meat of a small tea-party in Western 
Europe. When the fuel is out in the long tunnel, 
and pending a fresh supply, then is the time for 
the thrifty Baba, or moujik's housewife, to bake the 
rye-bread. She is quite ignorant of the use and 
appliance of the domestic spatula, or baker's peel. 
She pokes the bread in with a broomstick, and fishes 
-it out with a long instrument, which, for a long 
time, I considered to be a mere agricultural stimu- 
lant to hay, to wit, a pitchfork, but which I was 
afterwards told was specially devoted to the removal 
of the bread from this primitive oven. 

An old Russian peasant-man who almost dotes, 
and a drunken varlet floundering on a bed, are all 
that we have seen yet human in Volnoi*. Sophron 
and the Starosta shall now give place to the wives, 
the children, and the young maidens of the Sloboda ; 
yet, when I come to tackle them, my ambition to 
possess pictorial talent sensibly diminishes — so little 
.rosiness, so little beauty, so few smiles have claims 
'upon my palette among the youngest women and 
girls. 

It is to be understood, that I have long since given 
up, and no more insist on, that long and fondly- 



286 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

preserved Annual tradition of the beauty of peasant 
girls, the merry ways of peasant children, the pretti- 
ness of villages, the picturesqueness of peasant cos- 
tume. I have buried the fallacious tradition along 
with other illusions. I give up pifFerari, the Salta- 
rella, purple vines, the rayed petticoats, and miniature 
tablecloth head-dresses of Italian Contadine, the 
harvesters of Leopold Robert, the brigands of Pinelli, 
the high-laced caps and shining sabots of little Nor- 
mande paysannes, the pretty Welsh girl with a 
man's hat, the skirt of her gown drawn through the 
pocket-holes, and a goat following at her heels ; the 
lustrous eyes and henna-tipped fingers of Turkish 
women, the pretty bare feet and long dark hair of 
the maids of Con naught, the buy-a-broom quaint- 
ness of the yellow-haired Alsaciennes, the ribboned 
boddices, straw hats, and chintz skirts of our own 
comely peasant girls in merry England. I know how 
melancholy are the habitations and ways of poverty. 
I know that Blankanese flower-girls, Contadine, 
Normande paysannes, Turkish houris, Connaught 
maidens, barefooted and beauteous, are conventional 
artificialities, miade to order, exhibited, ticketed, and 
appraised, for the benefit of artists' studios, aristo- 
cratic families who like Norman wet-nurses, writers 
of oriental poems, the frequenters of the Alster Bas- 
sin promenade at Hamburg, and the artists who 
illustrate the wild Irish novels. 

So, prepared for the prosaic, I am not disappointed 
at as great a paucity of the beautiful as of the pic- 
turesque among Russian peasant women. But, as 
in the homeliest, plainest villages in the west, I have 



KUSSIANS AT HOME. 287 

seen and delighted in some rough gayety, and an 
unpretending neatness and a ruddy comeliness, that 
to me compensated for any absent amount of Annu- 
alism in feature, form, or attire, I cannot avoid feel- 
ing as though I had swallowed the contents of a 
belt of Number-four shot — so heavy am I — ^when I 
consider the women and children here. The negro 
slave will laugh, and jest, and show all his white 
teeth, before half the wounds from his last cutting- 
up are healed; but the Russian peasant, male or 
female, is — when sober — always mournful, dejected, 
doleful. All the songs he sings are monotonous 
complaints, drawling, pining, and despairing. You 
have heard how the Swiss soldiers used to weep 
and die sometimes for homesickness at the notes of 
the Ranz des Vaches. The Muscovite moujik has 
a perpetual home-sickness upon him ; but it is a 
sickness, not for, but of his home. He is sick of his 
life and of himself. When drunk, only, the Russian 
peasant lights up into a feeble corpse-candle sort of 
gayety ; but it is temporary and transient, and he 
sobers himself in sackcloth and ashes. 

Home is not as a home held by in any class in 
Russia. It very rarely happens that moujiks who 
from serfs have become merchants of the second 
guild, and amassed large fortunes, ever think in their 
declining days of retiring to the village which has 
given them birth, or even of making bequests bene- 
ficial to their native place at their death. Soldiers 
too, when discharged after their time of service has 
expired, scarcely ever return to their village. They 
prefer becoming servants and Dvorniks in the large 



288 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

towns. " Eh ! and what would you have them 
do ? " a vivacious Russian gentleman, with whom 
I had been conversing on the subject, asked me. 
They are no longer serfs, and are of no use to their 
seigneur. They are no longer young, and are no 
longer wanted for the conscription. What would 
you have them do in this village of yours ? What 
indeed? Governmentally-inclined philosophers say 
that the E-ussians are so patriotic that home is home 
to them, " be it ever so homely," throughout the 
whole extent of the empire, and that they are as 
much at home in the steppes of the Ukraine as in 
the morasses of Lake Lodoga. I am of opinion 
myself, that the homely feeling does not exist at all 
among the Russian people. Russian military officers 
have told me that an epidemic melancholia some- 
times breaks out among young recruits which is 
broadly qualified as a Mai du Pays ; but I think it 
might be far better described as a Mai de Position. 
The position of a recruit for the first six months of 
his apprenticeship is, perhaps, the most intolerable 
and infernal noviciate which a human being can 
well suffer — a combination of the situation of the 
young bear with all his troubles to come, the mon- 
key upon that well-known allowance X)f many kicks 
and few halfpence, the hedgehog with his prickles 
inwards, instead of outwards, and the anti-slavery 
preacher whose suit of tar and feathers is just begin- 
ning to peel off". When, hdwever, the recruit has 
swallowed sufficient stick, he very soon gets pver his 
Mai du Pays. Rationally envisaging the question 
of home-loving in nationalities, the Great Britons 



RUSSIANS at' home. 289 

(English, Irish, and Scotch), though the greatest 
travellers and longest residents abroad, are the peo- 
ple most remarkable for a steadfast love for their 
home, and a steadfast determination to return to it at 
some time or another. After them must be ranked 
the French, who always preserve an affectionate rev- 
erence for their pays ; but for all the sentimental 
Vaterland and Suce-Heimweg songs of the Ger- 
mans, the hundreds of German tailors, bootmakers, 
and watchmakers, one finds in every European capi- 
tal, seem to get on very well — at least, up to three- 
score and ten, or thereabouts — ^without looking for- 
ward to a return home. Your Dane or Swede, so 
long as he remains in his own land, is very fond of 
it; but, once persuaded to quit it, he thoroughly 
naturalizes himself in the country which he has 
adopted, and" forgets all about Denmark and Swe- 
den. As to the Americans, they never have any 
homes. They locate ; and as gladly locate at Spitz- 
bergen as at Hartford, Connecticut. The Poles, per- 
haps, are really attached to home ; but the Czar is 
in possession; and we know that the most home- 
loving Briton would be loth to go back to his little 
house in Camberwell if he was aware of an abhor- 
rent broker's man sitting in the front parlour. 

There is a Baba, a peasant girl, who is sitting 
listlessly on a rough-hewn bench at the door of one 
of the homogeneous hovels. She is not quite un- 
occupied, for she has the head of a gawky girl of ten 
on her knee, and is — well, I need not describe the 
universal pastime with which uncleanly nations fill 
up their leisure time. 

13 



290 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

The Baba is of middle size ; a strong, well-hung, 
likely wench enough. Her face and arms are burnt 
to a most disagreeable tawny, tan brown : the colour 
of the pigskin of a second-hand saddle that has been 
hanging for months — exposed to every weather — - 
outside a broker's shop in Vinegar Yard, Drury 
Lane, London, is, perhaps, the closest image I can 
give of her face's hue. Nay ; there is a wood, or 
rather preparation of wood, used by upholsterers — 
not rosewood, ebony, mahogany, walnut, oak, but a 
fictitiously browned, ligneous substance, called Pem- 
broke. I have seen it, at sales, go in the guise of a 
round table for one pound nine. I mind it in cata- 
logues : Pembroke chest of drawers — pembroke work- 
table. I know its unwholesome colour, and dully, 
blinking sheen, which no beeswax, no household- 
stuff, no wash-leather can raise to a generous polish. 
Pembroke is the Russian peasant complexion. The 
forehead low and receding. The roots of the hair of 
a dirty straw-colour, (growing in alarmingly close 
proximity to the eyebrows, as if they were originally 
the " same concern," and the low forehead a bone of 
contention which had grown up between them and 
dissolved the partnership.) Set very close together, 
in this brown face, are two eyes — ^respectable as to 
size — and light-blue in colour, which, as the orbs 
themselves are quite lustreless and void of specula- 
tion, has a very weird — not to say horrifying — effect. 
The nose broad, thick, unshapely, as if the os-nasi 
had been suddenly covered up with a lump of clay, 
but that no refinements of moulding, no hesitating 
compromises between the Roman, the pug, and the 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. • 291 

snub had been gone through. It is as though Na- 
ture had done some million of these noses by con- 
tract, and they had been clapped indiscriminately 
on as many million moujik faces. Not to grow 
Slawkenbergian on the subject of noses, I may con- 
clude, nasally, by remarking that the nostrils are 
wide apart — quite circular — and seemingly punched, 
rather than perforated, with a violent contempt of 
reference to the requirements of symmetry of posi- 
tion. The mouth is not bad, — lips red enough — 
teeth remarkably sound and white — and the entire 
features would be pleasant, but that the mouth- 
corners are drawn down, and that the under lip is 
pendulous — not sensuously, but senselessly. The 
chin has a curious triangular dimple in the centre ; 
for all the organs of hearing visible, the Baba might 
be as earless — she is certainly as unabashed — as 
Defoe ; the neck is the unmitigated bull pattern : 
short, clumsy, thick-set, and not, I am afraid, very 
graceful in a young female ; the shoulders broad 
and rounded (that back is well accustomed to carry- 
ing burdens, and prodigious burdens the Russian 
women do carry sometimes) ; the feet are large, long, 
and flat, the hands not very large, but terribly cor- 
rugated as to their visible venous economy. How 
could it be otherwise, when every species of manual 
labour (they build log-houses, though I have not 
seen them lay bricks) except horse-driving, is shared 
with the ruder sex by women ? The Babas of a." 
Russian village have their specially feminine em- 
ployments, it is true. They may spin flax ; they 
may weave ; they may cook ; they may wash linen ; 



292 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

but it is at the sole will and pleasure of the seigneur 
or the bourmister, if they are in Corvee to him, to 
set them tasks of sawing wood, or plastering walls, 
or dragging trucks, or whatever else may suit his 
seignoral or bourmistral caprice. If the Baba, or her 
husband, or father, or whoever else owns her labour 
— for an independent spinster, an unprotected Rus- 
sian female is, save in the upper classes, not to be 
found — is at obrok, instead of corvee, the employ- 
ments he may give to his Baba may be even more 
miscellaneous. I have seen women in Russia occu- 
pied in the most incongruous manner ; standing on 
ladders, whitewashing, sweeping streets, hammering 
at pots and kettles, like tinkers; driving pigs ; and, 
in the Gostinno'i-dvors, selling second-hand goods 
by auction ? 

I have alluded to the Baba's feet. The Russian 
nobility are as sensitive as the late Lord Byron as 
to the aristocratic presages to be drawn from a 
small hand and foot. I have frequently heard in 
Russian society that genteel dictum common in 
England, that no person can be well-born unless 
water will flow beneath the arch of his instep with- 
out wetting it. I believe that in- the short reign of 
his late Majesty Richard, third of that name, similar 
notions began to be entertained in polite society 
with reference to humps. 

The Baba's dress is not pretty. To do her jus- 

■'tice, though, there cannot be the slightes^t doubt as 

to her possession of — well, not a shirt — that is a 

masculine garment, but a , but it is unpardonable 

to mention in English what every English lady will 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 293 

name in the French language without a shadow of 
hesitation — well : a white cotton or very coarse 
linen under-garment. And this ordinarily inner- 
most garment is very liberally displayed ; for the 
'gown-sleeves are very scanty — mere shoulder-straps, 
in fact : and the real sleeves are those of the under- 
garment, to name which, is to run in peril of depor- 
tation to that Cayenne of conversaziones — Coventry. 
There is an equally generous display of body linen, 
more or less dazzlingly white in front, — the garment 
forming an ample gorget from the neck to the waist, 
the bust of the gown being cut square, of the an- 
tique form, with which you are familiar in the por- 
traits of Anne Boleyn, but very much lower. In 
aristocratic Russian society the ladies have their 
necks and shoulders as decolletSes as the best mod- 
ern milliner among us could desire ; and in aristo- 
cratic Russian theatres the ballerine are as scantily 
draped as at home here ; but, among the gens du 
peuple^ remnants of oriental jealousy and seclusion 
of women are very perceptible, and the forms are 
studiously concealed. But for an eccentricity of 
attire, I am about to point out, high boots, long 
skirts, and high necks are productive of a most 
exemplary shapelessness and repudiation of any 
Venus-like toilettes, as arranged by those eminent 
modistes, the Mademoiselles Graces. 

This trifling eccentricity consists in the Russian 
peasant women having a most bewildering custom 
of wearing a very tight waist at mid-neck, and a 
very full bust at the waist. Their corsage presents 
the aspect of the section of a very ripe, full pear, 



294 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

resting on its base. Beneath the clavicles all is as 
flat as a pancake ; where we expect to profit by the 
triumphs of tight-lacing as productive or a genteel 
and wasp-like waist, we find this astonishing pro- 
tuberance. The waist is upside down. How they 
manage to accomplish this astonishing feat ; w^hether 
they lacteally nourish dumb-bells or babies made of 
pig-lead ; whether it be physical malformation, or 
some cunning sub-camicial strapping and bandag- 
ing ; whether it be the effect of one or of all these, I 
am not aware ; but there is that effect in the Baba — 
baffling, puzzling, and to me as irritating as though 
the girl wore a shoe on her head, or broad-brimmed 
hats on her feet. (There is, by the way, really a 
shoe-shaped coiffure prevalent among the peasant 
girls of Tarjok and Twer. They do not wear the 
kakoschnik, but in lieu of that picturesque head- 
dress they assume a tall conical structure of paste- 
board, covered, according to their means, with col- 
oured stuff, silk or velvet, and ornamented with rib- 
bons, spangles, bits of coloured glass, and small 
coins. The apex of the sugar-loaf cap leans forward 
curvilineally, and then is again turned up at the 
extreme peak, somewhat in the manner of a Turkish 
slipper or papousch. This when, as is frequently 
the case, it has a streaming veil behind, bears a 
quaint resemblance to the old peaked head-dresses 
we see in Strutt.) "Why am I now irritated be- 
cause this Russian slave-woman chooses to go into 
a feeble-minded course of ridiculous deformity ? 
She is not one whit more absurd, or more deformed, 
than the high-born ladies in the West, with the hair 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 295 

SO scragged off their sheep's heads, with the watch- 
glass waists, with the men's coats and tails and big 
buttons, with the concave pancakes for hats ; with 
the eleven balloon-skirts one above another, one I 
presume, of wood, one of block-tin, one of steel, one 
of whalebone, one (I know) of the horse, another 
(maybe) of the cat; a seventh, perchance, of the 
nether-millstone. Now I think of it, I am more, 
much more, irritated at the Guys, who go about 
civilized streets, — the Guys who ought to be beauti- 
tiful women. I cry out loudly against the fashions 
at noon-day. I clench my fist on the public pave- 
ment. I dare say the police have noticed me. I 
feel inclined to pull off my shoes, like George Fox, 
the roaring Quaker, and walk through the streets of 
Lichfield, or London, or Paris, crying, Woe ! to the 
wicked city. 

On her head, the Baba wears a very old, foul, 
dingy, frayed, and sleezy yellow shawl, tied care- 
lessly under her head, in a knot like a prize-fighter's 
fist ; one peak of which shawl falls over her head, 
on to her back, like the peak of the cagoule of a 
black penitent. It is a very ugly, dirty, head-cover- 
ing : with a tartan pattern it would be first-cousin 
to the snood of a Highland shepherdess, and it is 
even more closely related, in general arrangement, 
to the unsightly head-shawl worn by the factory- 
gnls of Blackpool and Oldham. But, this is only 
her every-day head-dress. For Sundays and feast- 
days she has the kakoschnik, than which no prettier 
or gracefuller coiffure could be found, after the 
jewelled turban of the Turkish Sultana has been 



296 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

admitted as the pearl of pearls, and light of the 
harem of beauty and grace. 

The kakoschnik is a shallow shako, (that worn by 
our artillerymen twenty years since, but not ex- 
ceeding, here, four inches in depth, may be taken as 
a sufficiently accurate model,) shelving from front 
to back, concave as to summit, and terminated at 
the back with a short, fan-like veil of white lace. 
The kakoschnik is worn quite at the back of the 
head ; the parting of the hair, as far as where our 
tortoise-shell comb uprises in the back-hair, being 
left uncovered. In wet weather, this kakoschnik is 
but an inefficient protection for the head ; but the 
Baba disdains, when once she has assumed the 
national head-dress, to cover it with the inelegant 
shawl-cowl. In a dripping shower she will, at most, 
pull the skirt of her gown over her head. The sub- 
structure of the kakoschnik is buckram — more fre- 
quently pasteboard. It is covered with the richest 
and brightest-coloured material the Baba can afford 
to buy. It is decorated with trinkets, spangles, 
silver copeck pieces, (now prohibited,) gold-lace : 
nay, according to her degree in the peasant hierar- 
chy, seed-pearls, and, in extreme cases of wealth, 
real precious stones. The Russian women have to 
the full as great a penchant for decorating their per- 
sons with gold and silver coins as have the maids 
of Athens and the khanums of Turkey for twining 
sequins and piastres in their hair. A few years ago 
there was quite a mania in society for wearing 
bracelets and necklaces formed of new silver five- 
copeck pieces, strung together. These are about 



RUSSIANS AT HOME. 297 

the size of our silver pennies — somewhat thicker, 
not broader in diameter, (a copeck is worth about 
five-eighths of a halfpenny,) and being beautifully 
coined, are delightful little ornaments. But the 
government sternly prohibited such a defacing of 
the current coin of the empire, and plainly hinted at 
the possible eventualities of the Pleiti or whip and 
Siberia, in the case of recalcitrant coin-tamperers. 

The Russian girl who possesses a jewelled kako- 
schnik must, of course, have the rest of her costume 
to match, in richness and elegance. Some travellers 
— Mr. Leozon le Due, and M. Hommaire de Hell 
among the number — declare that they have been in 
Russian villages on great feast-days, the Pentecost, 
for example, where the maidens were promenading 
in kirtles of cloth of gold, tunics of satin and silver 
brocade; white silk-stockings; kakoschniks blazing 
with real gold and jewelry ; red morocco shoes ; lace 
veils of application-work falling to the heels ; heavy 
bracelets of gold and silver; pearl necklaces; dia- 
mond ear-rings ; long tresses of hair interlaced with 
ribbons and artificial flowers. Nothing richer or 
more picturesque than this could well be imagined ; 
but I am afraid that Annualism is marvellously 
prevalent in the description. Novaia Ladoga, I 
think, is mentioned as one of the villages where this 
splendacious costume is to be seen. That there is a 
Lake of Ladoga, I know; and a village by the 
name of Novaia Ladoga is probable ; but I am ap- 
prehensive that the way to that village on gala days 
is difficult, and dangerous, and doubtful; that the 
only way to go to it is " straight down the crooked 

13* 



298 A JOURNEY DUE NOBTH. 

lane, and all round the square ; " and that the Pente- 
cost time, when the village maidens walk about in 
cloth of gold, red morocco shoes, and diamond ear- 
rings, will be in the year of Beranger's millennium. 



xni. 

hetde's. ■ ^ 

The widow Heyde is dead, and Zaccharai reigns 
in her stead ; but Heyde's is still : even as Tom and 
Joe's coffee-houses in London are still so called, 
though Tom and Joe have been sleeping the sleep of 
the just these hundred years, and Jack and Jerry may 
be the tapsters now, in their place. So Heyde, being 
dead, is Heyde still. Le roi est mort ! vive le roi I 

That beefsteak and trimmings with which on 
board the little pyroscaphe that brought me to this 
Vampire Venice — this Arabian Nightmare — this the 
reality of Coleridge's distempered, opium-begotten 
Xanadu ; (for here of a surety lives, or lived, the 
Kubla Khan who decreed'the stately pleasure dome, 
and possessed the caverns measureless to man, 
through which ran that river down to the sunless 
sea ;) — that beefsteak and trimmings, rouble-costing, 
with which coming to Xanadu — I mean St. Peters- 
burg — I was incautious enough to feed the wide- 
mouthed Petersen, did not turn out wholly unpro- 
ductive to uip. The quality of that beefsteak and 



heyde's. 299 

etceteras was not strained. It may, or it may not 
have fallen like the gentle dew from heaven on 
Petersen : but it undeniably blessed him that gave 
and him that received it. Petersen's stomach was 
filled, his wide mouth satisfied ; so he was blessed : 
the gratitude of repletion, (I have seen a tiger in a 
menagerie wink like the most beneficent of charity- 
dinner stewards after a more than ordinarily succu- 
lent shin-bone,) the beatitude of fulness led him to 
bestow on me a small, ragged, and dirty scrap of 
paper, on which was scrawled in German, and in — 
something I thought at first to be the mere cali- 
graphic midsummer madness of Petersen, but which 
I afterwards discovered to be his best Russ — these 
words, " Heyde's — Cadetten-linie, Wassily-Ostrow 
— young Mr. Trobbener's recommendation at J. 
Petersen." Who the mysterious young Mr. Trob- 
bener was, I never was able to discover. Did Peter- 
sen recommend him, or he Petersen ? Were Peter- 
sen and Trobbener the same personages ? Was 
Petersen himself young Mr. Petersen, or old Mr. 
Petersen ? Was he of any age, or for all time, or for 
none ? Be it as it may, through the medium of this 
paper, I too was blessed ; for though on the first im- 
pulse I was inclined to scorn Heyde's and to put 
Petersen down as an unmitigated tout, it turned out 
that by an .accident — by a mere fluke of shiftlessness 
of purpose — I did not go to the Hotel Napoleon, or 
the Hotel Coulon, or the Hotel Klee, or to the HOtel 
des Princes, or to Mrs. Spink's, or to the Misses 
Benson's, or to any of the ordinary hotels or board- 
ing houses where ordinary and sensible travellers 



300 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

■Qsually turn up on their first arrival in Petropolis, 
Carrying out the apparent decision in the superior 
courts that I am never to do any thing like anybody 
else, I managed to lose all my fellow-travellers in the 
yard of the temporary custom-house on the English 
quay, (I hasten to observe for the benefit of the crit- 
ics who are waiting round the corner for me with big 
sticks, that the custom-house is at the southern ex- 
tremity of Wassily-Ostrow, and that the cellars 
where we were searched were but a species of lug- 
gage chapel-of-ease to the greater Douane.) Then, 
going very vaguely down unto Droschky, I fell at 
last among Heyde, luggage and all. A very excel- 
lent find ; a nugget of treasure-trove it was to me ; 
for I declare that with the exception of the fortress 
of Cronstadt, (the congeries of forts, yards, work- 
shops, guardships, and gunboats, I mean,) which is 
one eye-blinding instance of apple-pie order and 
new-pin cleanliness, the Hotel Heyde is the only 
perfectly clean place — bar none : nor palaces, nor 
churches, nor princess's chalets in the Islands — with 
which, in the Russian Empire, this traveller is ac- 
quainted. The Hotel Heyde smelt certainly of soap 
and soup ; but both were nice smells and not too 
powerful. It was reported that one bug had been 
bold enough to cross the Neva from the Winter Pal- 
ace to Heyde' s some years previously ; but, whether 
he was paddled across the river in a gondola, or 
driven across the No vi- Most, or New Bridge, in a 
droschky, was never known. He came to Heyde's, 
but broke his heart the first night in a miserable 
attempt to make an impression on the skin of the 



heyde's. ' 301 

traveller for a German toy-merchant, just arrived 
from the fair of Nishi- Novgorod, (where there are 
bugs that bite like sharks, who have been under arti- 
cles to crocodiles.) A housemaid nosed him in the 
lobby next morning ; but he saved himself from the 
disgrace of public squashing by suicide, and they 
show his skin in the bar to this day. 

To be a little serious, Heyde's was from top to 
bottom scrupulously and delightfully clean. I have 
no interest in proclaiming its merits to the world. I 
have paid my bill. I am never going there again. 
I don't know Heyde — I mean Zacharai' — personally ; 
for it was with Barnabay Brothers, his representatives, 
that I always transacted business. Still, I can con- 
scientiously recommend to all future purposing Rus- 
sian travellers, the Hotel Heyde, as being clean and 
comfortable. It is dear, and noisy, and out of the 
way ; but that is neither here nor there. If I had a 
few of Heyde's cards with me, I would distribute 
them as shamelessly as any hotel tout on Calais 
Pier ; and my opinion of Petersen now is, that he 
is not merely a wide-mouthed and carnivorous wolf- 
cub, in a beaver porringer — like the city sword-bearer, 
who goes about the world seeking eleemosynary 
beefsteaks and trimmings — but that he is a philan- 
thropist, who, disgusted at the narrow mindedness 
and heart-sterility of the company that used to go 
to Helsingfors, has proposed to himself as a mission 
the perpetual pyroscaphal parcurrence of the Neva 
from Petersburg to Cronstadt and back again, and 
the ceaseless distribution of unclean scraps of paper 
telling in Teuton and in Sclavonic of Heyde's, and 



302 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

young Mr. Trobbener, and himself, simply because 
he is a philanthropist, and that Heyde's is clean, and 
he, Petersen, has stayed there, and knows it. 

I came to Heyde's — ^though but one man — in two 
droschkies, like that strange animal one of which 
came over in two ships. In this wise. I don't mean 
to imply, literally, that I had one droschky for my 
body, and another for my legs, d la Americaine ; 
though I was quite fatigued enough to have ren- 
dered that means of conveyance, had it been in 
accordance with the proprieties of Petersburg, or 
even with possibility, delightful. But this was not 
.to be. My having two droschkies was necessitated 
by there being none but the little Moscow side sad- 
dles on wheels disengaged, which hold indeed two 
passengers ; but, in the way of luggage, will not 
accommodate so much as a carpet-bag in addition 
to the human load. How ever my luggage was 
loaded, or managed to be kept on the little rickety 
bench with the little wild beast with the long mane 
and tail in it, and the large wild man in the caftan, 
the beard, and the boots, bestriding where the splash- 
board ought to have been, but wasn't — I have not 
the slightest idea. However, with a bump, some 
jolts, and some screams, my luggage was heaped on 
one droschky, and I on another ; then everybody had 
some copecks given them — including an official in 
Hessian boots who suddenly appeared from a back 
door in the yard (I really conjectured it to be the 
dust-hole) who demanded seventy-five, in French, 
haughtily, who received them very unthankfully, 
and who, saying something to another official, 



heyde's. 303 

dressed in gray, (he had five copecks,) which I sup- 
pose was Open Sesame! disappeared majestically 
into the dust-hole again. Open Sesame ! let us out 
into a dusty street ; for I and the droschky-drivers 
and the travellers had all been prisoned within the 
custom-house's moated grange till this, and it had 
pleased the man in the dust-hole to let us out. 

The phaethon droschkies, the double-bodied drosch- 
kies, the caleche droschkies, had all driven away 
hotelwards through the dust— I did hope that Miss 
Wapps might be well bitten that same night ; and I 
w^as alone with the droschkies, the dust, and the 
Petersen's bit of paper. There was dust on either 
side, and dust beneath, and dust behind us, and 
dust before, and nothing more, save the occasional 
vision of the luggage-droschky a-head, which was 
bumping up and down and in and out of the pul- 
verous cloud in a most extraordinary manner. I 
now first became acquainted with the fact, that as 
soon as a Russian Ischvostchik gets on a tolerably 
long road-way, he gives his horse his head, and 
throwing up his own legs, yells with delight, and is 
— ^till he is compelled to heave-to by the menacing 
halberd of a Boutotsnik — supremely happy. We 
were in the Perspective of something or other — ^the 
Dusty-Bobboff Perspective I was inclined to call it 
at the time — and the driver, anticipating with joy a 
quiet mile or so of furious driving, suddenly gave 
the vicious little brute he was driving his head, fol- 
lowing it with the usual performances of leg-ele- 
vating, arm-flourishing, and yelling. I decidedly 
thought that Ischvostchik had gone mad. The 



304 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

horse being given his head, took in addition his four 
shoes, his hocks, his tail, and every thing that was 
his, and made good use of them, scrambling, tear- 
ing, pawing along, and I almost was led to think 
yelling as well as his maniacal driver. What was I 
to do ? What could I do, but catch hold of the 
Ischvostchik, at last, quite frantically by the shoul- 
ders, and entreat him to stop. For a wonder, he 
understood me, as I thought intuitively ; but, as I 
afterwards found, from my hurried Stop I stop I be- 
ing very like to the short, sharp Russian stoi! stoi"! 

I have heard gentlemen who ride to hounds talk 
of the remarkably fine burst they have had after that 
carrion with the bushy tail some November morn- 
ing. I have read the terribly grotesque epic of Miss 
Kielmansegge and her golden leg ; Burger has told 
me in Lenore how fast the dead ride ; I have seen 
some Derbies, Oaks, and Doncasters ; I have trav- 
elled by some express trains ; I have seen Mr. Tur- 
ner's picture of Hail, rain, steam, and speed ; and 
now, if for hail you will substitute dust, and for 
rain hot wind, and for steam a wild horse, and in- 
crease the speed as many times tenfold as you like, 
you will have a picture of me in the droschky, and 
the droschky itself flying through the dusty Perspec- 
tives of Petersburg. 

Over a bridge I know, where there was a shrine- 
chapel, open at the four sides, where people were 
worshipping. Then dust. Then along a quay. 
More dust. And then the seemingly interminable 
flight along Perspectives. And at last, Heyde's. 

A building, apparently about a third of the size 



heyde's. 305 

of the Bank of England, with the Corinthian pilas- 
ters beaten flat, with a hugeous blue signboard 
somewhat akin to that dear old Barclay and Per- 
kins one in the England I may never see again ; on 
this signboard Heyde's, with some of the unknown 
tongue beneath. Beyond, over the way, and some 
miles on either side, houses considerably bigger 
than Heyde's, all painted either in white or more 
glaring yellow, and with some red but more green 
roofs.* And, save our party, not a living soul to be 
seen. A defection of one took place immediately 
from our band, small as it was, the luggage Isch- 
vostchik, feeling, no doubt, athirst — how thirsty was 
I ! — incontinently diving down some stone steps into 
a semi-cellar that yawned beneath Heyde's parlour 
windows. Such half-cellars — not level with the 
pavement, and not an honest area depth beneath it 
— are common in the grandest streets of Petropolifc^. 
The meanest little shops crawl at the feet of gigan- 
tic buildings, like Lazarus lying in his rags before 
Dives's door. The cellar in which my Ischvostchik 
had disappeared was, I was not slow in concluding, 
a Vodki shop : first, from the strong spirituous 

* Comparison, even with the diminution of a third, to the vast- 
ness of the Bank of England is of course a little extravagant ; 
but I wished to give the reader a notion, there and then, of the 
astonishing size of even private houses in St. Petersburg. The 
great imperial rule is carried out even in architecture as in gov- 
ernment. Aut Ccesar, aut Ivan Ivanavitch, who is considerably 
less than a nullity. In Eussian houses there are but two classes 
— hovels and palaces. I know one lodging-house in St. Peters- 
burg, close to the Moscow Railway Terminus, which has more 
than two thousand inmates. 



806 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

odour which exuded therefrom ; next, from the un- 
mistakable sign of a bunch of grapes rudely carved 
in wood, and profusely gilt, suspended over the 
doorway. And have I not a right to call this a 
remarkable people, who keep grog-shops, and sell 
meat-pies, in the basement of their palaces ? I was 
about to collar the second Ischvostchik to prevent 
his fleeing too ; but he, good fellow, wished to see 
me comfortably into Heyde's, or was, perhaps, anx- 
ious about the fare, and he remained. He was so 
anxious about this fare that he demanded it at once 
with passionate entreaties and gesticulations, crying 
out, when I gave him to understand by signs that 
he would be paid when I was inside, " Nietts Geyde ! 
Nietts Geyde ! Sitchas ! " Why should he have 
objected to be paid- by Heyde, or at Heydes, or 
Geydes, as he called it? Wearied at last with 
manual language, I asked him how much he and 
his brother Jehu thought themselves entitled to; 
w^hereupon he held up such a hand — the hand in a 
baronet's scutcheon was nothing to it for bigness, 
boldness, and beefiness — and cried out, " Roubliy 
cerebram ! Roubliy cerebram! " counting one, two, 
three fingers ; from which I gathered that he wanted 
three roubles — nine and sixpence — for a twenty min- 
utes' drive. But I did not pay him ; for, with the 
exception of one English sixpence, one Irish harp 
halfpenny, one Danish Rigsbank schilling, and some 
very small deer in the way of copecks and silber- 
groschen, I had no money. 

I have been keeping the reader a most unconscion- 
able time at Heyde's Hotel door ; but I am certain 



heyde's. 807 

that I was kept there a most unconscionable time 
myself. The Ischvostchik who didn't go to the 
Vodki shop, and who had so great an objection to 
being paid by Geyde, hung himself — that is about 
the word — not for suicidal but for tintinnabulatory 
purposes, to a great bell that projected from the 
doorjamb like a gibbet, or a wholesale grocer's 
crane. He swung about, tugging at this bell till I 
could hear it booming through the house like a Chi- 
nese gong, but nobody answered it. There was a 
great balcony on the first floor, with a Marquise 
verandah above it, and in this balcony a very stout 
gentleman smoking a cigarette. I shouted out an 
inquiry to him in French and German, as to whether 
there was anybody in the house, but he merely 
smiled, wagged his fat head, and didn't answer me. 
He was either very deaf or very rude. Nobody 
came, while before me glared the great closed door 
of Heyde's which was painted a rich maroon colour, 
and had a couple of great knob bell-handles, like 
the trunnions of brass cannon. Nobody came. It 
was now nearly six o'clock, but the sun was blazing 
away with noontide vigour, and seemingly caring 
no more than my friend Captain Smith for any cur- 
fews that might toll the knell of parting day. And 
the infernal dust, with no visible motive influence, 
came trooping down the street in rolling caravans of 
brown, hot, stifling clouds. And the Ischvostchik 
kept swinging at the demoniac bell, which kept 
booming, and nobody came ; and I began to think of 
crying aloud, this is not Petropolis or Petersburg of 
E-ussia, but the city of Dis, and Francesca of Rimini 



808 • A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

passed by in that last cloud caravan, and yonder 
bell-swinger is not an Ischvostchik, but P. Virgilius 
Maro, inducting me, Dante Alighieri, into the mys- 
teries of the Inferno. Would that I had Dante's 
stool to sit upon — to say nothing of the genius of 
that Florentine ! 

A bearded party in a red shirt (his beard was red 
too) eventually put in an appearance through the 
tardy opening of the maroon-coloured door. He 
exchanged a few compliments or abusive epithets — 
they may have been one, they may have been the 
other — with the Ischvostchik ; then, closing the door 
again, he disappeared and left me to desolation. 

How long we might have continued dwellers at 
the threshold at Heyde's inhospitable door is exceed- 
ingly uncertain — perhaps till the cows came home, 
perhaps till I went mad — but, just as I began to 
speculate on one or other of those eventualities, it 
suddenly occurred to my Ischvostchik to call out in 
a tone of triumph, " Geyde na Dom," which I con- 
jectured to be a sort of Muscovite psean for Heyde 
being to the fore. And, following out the discovery 
he had announced with such Eureka-like elocution, 
the droschky-driver did no more nor less than turn 
one of the brass-cannon-trunnion-like door-handles 
and walk me into Heyde's hall. It was the old 
story of Mahomet and the Mountain. Heyde 
would not come to us, so we were obliged to go to 
Heyde's — which, by the way, we might perhaps 
have done a quarter of an hour previously. But I 
never was the right man in the right place yet, nor 
did the right thing. The second or luggage Isch- 



hbyde's. ^ 309 

vostchik — he who had been so prompt in disappear- 
ing into the vodki-shop, and who had now returned 
smelling very strongly of that abominable black- 
sheep of the not-at-any-time-over-reputable Alcohol 
family — evidently thought very little of my strength 
of purpose in .obtaining admittance into an hotel. 
He, with a contemptuous leer on his face, (which, 
round and fiat, and straightly touched for line and 
feature, was not unlike the mystic dial that crowns 
the more mystic columns in the inner sheet of the 
Times newspaper,) seemed to taunt me with my 
inability to get into Heyde's ; to imply, moreover, 
that he knew well enough how to effect an entrance, 
because he hafed me as an Anglisky, and hated the 
other Ischvostchik, his brother, for being his brother, 
simply. 

The sun had been brightly glaring outside ; the 
hall of Heyde's was painted above and on either 
side a cool green ; and the transition from the brazen 
desert outside to these leafy shades was pleasant as 
unexpected. It would have been much pleasanter, 
though, had we found any one living soul to wel- 
come us ; but nobody came. 

At the extremity of the hall there commenced a 
very dark stone staircase, beneath which there was 
a recess, most uncomfortably like a grave with a bed 
in it. My eyes had been very much tried by the 
glare without and the green within, and my knowl- 
edge of external objects was blurred, not to say ren- 
dered null and void, by sundry elaborate geometrical 
patterns of fantastical design and parti- coloured hue 
swimming about in the verdant darkness. So I was 



310 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

not able to aver with any degree of distinctness 
whether there were anybody or not on the bed in 
the recess that looked like a grave. Not so with 
the Ischvostchik ; he with cat-like agility dived into 
the recess, and, after many struggles, brought into 
the greenness the man with the red shirt who had 
whilom opened the front door, and shut it again in 
our faces. Him he shook and objurgated in much 
violent Russ ; at last he seemed to make the red- 
shirted door-shutter comprehend for what reason a 
very tired traveller should arrive at an hotel in St. 
Petersburg in two droschkies — himself in one, his 
luggage in another. He cried out " Portier, portier ! " 
and darting down a dark corridor, presently returned 
with a little old man, in faded European costume — 
very snuffy, stupid, semi-idiotic, as it seemed to me. 
1 could not at all make out to what nation, if any, 
he had in the origin belonged ; but I managed to 
hammer a few words of German into him, to the 
effect that I was very tired and dusty and hungry, 
and that I required a bed, food, a bath, and the 
payment of the droschky. I don't think he clearly 
understood a tithe of my discourse, but on the retina 
of his mind there gradually, I imagine, became im- 
pressed the image of a traveller who wanted to 
spend his money at Heyde's, and ultimately fee 
him, the porter, with silver roubles. So he rang a 
HAND-BELL, wMch brought down one of the brothers 
Barnabay who manage Heyde's for Zacharai the 
Mythic ; and this brother Barnabay, (it was the stout 
brother,) understood me, the droschkies, the diffi- 
culty, everything. Would I, dear lord, as I was, 



hbyde's. 311 

show him my passport ? This was before Barnabay 
quite understood anything. I showed him my pass- 
port. He was so delighted with it as to keep it, but- 
toning it up in a stout coat-pocket, but assuring me 
that it was Ganz recht — g-anz recht I and immedi- 
ately became as fond of me as though he had known 
me from infancy, or as though I had been his other 
brother, and a Barnabay. He had my rugs, my cou- 
rier's bag, my spare caps and writing-case off my 
arms and shoulders instantaneously. That famous 
hand-bell was tinkled again, and two more red- 
shirted slaves of the bell appearing, a room was or- 
dered to be prepared and a bath to be heated for me. 
I had scarcely opened my mouth to tell him that I 
had no more Russian money, and that he must pay 
the droschky, when he had paid both. And now I, 
on my part, understood why the Ischvostchiks had 
wished me to pay them, and cried, " Nietts Geyde ! 
Nietts Geyde I " for, from their pitching my luggage 
viciously into the hall, from their pouring out a strain 
of half-whining, half-threatening remonstrances, and 
from Barnabay being evidently on the point, at one 
stage of the proceedings, to apply the punishment, 
not of the stick, but of the square-toed boot upon 
them, it is anything but doubtful that Geyde (repre- 
sented by Zacharai's representative Barnabay brother) 
was hard upon the Ischvostchiks, and gave them no 
more — perhaps a little less — than their fare. I am of 
opinion, too, that Geyde's or Heyde's was a little hard 
upon me, too, subsequently, in the bill relative to that 
same cab fare ; but surely somebody must be cheated, 
(as a Russian shop-keeper once naively remarked to 



312 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

me,) and who so fit to be cheated as an Inostranez 
— a stranger — and, what is much worse, an An- 
glisky ? 

Leaving the Ischvostchiks to lament, or curse, or 
pray for us in the hall, (I don't know which it was, 
but they made a terrible noise over it,) the nimble 
Barnabay skips before me up the great stone stair- 
case, which grows much lighter as we ascend, and 
which I begin to notice now (being somewhat re- 
covered from the glare and the greenness,) is of that 
new-pin like degree of cleanliness I have before 
hinted at. Then we push aside a glass door, and 
enter a vast chamber, half- American bar, half- Paris- 
ian cafe in appearance ; for, at a long counter cus- 
tomers are liquoring, or painting — or drinking drams, 
tell the unslanged truth ; and at little marble tables, 
customers are smoking and drinking demi-tasses : 
but wholly Russia, for all that ; for I can see, tower- 
ing through the tobacco-clouds, a giant stove, all 
carvings and sculpture, like Sir Cloudesly ShovelPs 
monument in Westminster Abbey. Then another 
glass-door ; then another corridor ; then the door of 
apartment Number Eighteen ; then another hand-bell 
is tinkled, and a real Russian chambermaid appears 
to open the bedroom door, and a real German waiter 
— for there is no promotion from the ranks at Heyde's ; 
and the red-chemised slaves of the bell are kept in 
their proper places — asks me, in first-rate North Ger- 
man, what I will have for dinner. 

The first sight of apartment Number Eighteen 
startles me, and I confess not very favourably. If 
that little recess beneath the staircase on the base- 



heyde's. 813 

merit were like a grave ; Number Eighteen is horribly 
like a family vault. It is of tremendous size — very 
dark — and the bed, which is covered with snowy 
white drapery, is very long, narrow, uncurtained, 
and a very short distance removed from the floor ; 
and has the closest and most unpleasant family re- 
semblance to the tomb of a Knight Templar. If, , 
in addition to this, I write that this long white bed 
is all alone, by itself, in the middle of the vault — I 
mean the bedchamber — that the inevitable stove 
seems even higher, bigger, and whiter that Sir 
Claudesly Shovell's monument in the cafe, ; that the 
chest of drawers is dreadfull)?^ like a brick sarcopha- 
gus ; that there are some massive, gloomy shelves, 
on which there are no coffins as yet, but which I 
fancy must have been designed to receive those last 
of snuff-boxes, which are to titillate the nose of hu- 
manity ; that the windows, though very numerous, 
are very small ; that the folding-doors of a great 
mahogany wardrobe yawn tombfully, as though 
they were the portals of the inner chamber of death ; 
that there is one corner cupboard which I can al- 
most make oath and swear, is the identical corner 
cupboard reserved by the especial Nemesis for years 
— ^the corner cupboard where the skeleton is — when 
I have given this hurried inventory of the furniture 
of Number Eighteen, it is a work of supererogation 
to relate that, being a nervous man, I shake my head 
when Barn ab ay Brother tells m.e the terms — ^two 
roubles a day, exclusive of attendance— and that I 
ask midly whether I cannot have a smaller, lighter, 
cheaper apartment. But I cannot have anything 

14 



314 A JOUKNEY DUE NORTH. 

smaller, cheaper, lighter, Zimmer. All else is full, 
engaged up to the eyes, three deep, till to-morrow- 
fortnight, till the Greek calends. I can go over to 
the Napoleon, to the Coulon, to the Deymouth, to 
the Klee, to the Princes, but I shall find everything 
(not that this poor house, dear lord, would wish to 
. lose your distinguished, and, of consideration, pat- 
ronage !) as full as the tomb of the Eleven Thou- 
sand Virgins at Cologne. This " funerals per- 
formed" allusion jars upon my nerves again, as 
having unpleasant reference to the family vault 
view of things in general. But, as I find I can't 
well obtain any other accommodation ; as I opine I 
can turn out and engage cheaper apartments in a 
private house to-morrow; as the vault, though a 
vault, looks a remarkably clean mausoleum, and does 
not by any means give me the impression that it is 
haunted even by the ghost of a flea, — such as poor 
dear William Blake, the supernaturalist painter, saw 
what time he witnessed a fairy's funeral in a garden 
by moonlight — I accede to the terms, and am swiftly 
at home at Heyde's. 

I say at home — and swiftly ; because no sooner have 
I accepted to sit at Heyde's, at fourteen silver roubles 
a week, than I become in Barnabay's mind, no lon- 
ger a wandering traveller, higgling and haggling for 
accommodation — but " Nummer achtsehn," — Num- 
ber Eighteen, duly housed and recognized ; my pass- 
port in Heyde's pocket (you will observe that I use the 
terms Heyde's, Barnabay, Zacharai, somewhat indif- 
ferently ; but is it not all one with regard to nomen- 
clature, when all is Heyde's ?) my name on Heyde's 



heyde's. 315 

house-slate, my name, in far more enduring charac- 
ters already, in Heyde's leger ; for, has he not paid 
the Ischvostchiks, and is not that the commencement 
of a goodly score ? 

At home at Heyde's, I have to repeat ; for perhaps, 
while the Brother Barnabay is chalking me up as 
Number Eighteen, one red-shirted slave of the bell 
has devoided me of almost every particle of apparel, 
and has, by some astonishing feat of gymnastic 
ability, got on to some ^adjacent housetop, where I 
can see him, and hear him brushing them, and hiss- 
ing meanwhile in approval, ostler fashion. Another 
vassal is preparing an adjacent bath-room, which 
(always remember that we are in a German hotel) 
is on the ordinary hot-water principle, and not the 
stewpan, combined with chemical distillery, finished 
off by Busbeian discipline and buckets-of-cold-water, 
Russian vapour-bath. Serf number three, the twin 
brother of the two others, has uncorded my luggage^ 
and is now tugging away at my boots, with so 
good-humoured a grin on his willing bearded coun- 
tenance that I am far more inclined to slap him on 
the shoulder than to remember that my feet are 
swollen, and that he has nearly dislocated my ankle. 
You find among the poor slave Russians — I can 
scarcely say the poorest, lowest, most degraded, when 
all are degraded, and low, and poor ; all figures of 
Zero, to swell the millions of roubles their masters 
possess, and make those Units wealthy and powerful 
— the kindest faces, the most willing, obliging, grate- 
ful dispositions in the world. To qualify that old 
Billingsgate locution, which, coarse as it is, is exactly 



316 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

applicable here, " Barring that a Russian moujik is 
a liar and a thief, no one can say that black is the 
white of his eye." He is kind ; he is grateful ; he is 
affectionate ; not quarrelsome when drunk ; untir- 
ingly industrious; (when on his own account, he will 
idle the lord's time away, and who can wonder ?) 
ordinarily frugal ; and as astonishingly self-denying 
as an Irish peasant when he has a purpose to serve. 
His vices are the vices of barbarism ; and here comes 
the difficulty in his treatment to those who are even 
most disposed to treat him kindly. I declare of my 
own knowledge that it is impossible to live in Russia, 
among the Russians, without feeling that the serfs — 
from domestic servants to farm labourers, from ladies' 
waiting-maids to village babas — laugh at what we 
should call kindness, and despise a master who does 
not act on the principle of a word and a blow. It 
is impossible to avoid becoming to a certain degree 
hardened and brutalized by the constant spectacle of 
unrestrained tyranny on the one hand, and by the 
impossibility of resistance on the other. Every one 
beats, and kicks, and cuffs, and calls his inferiors 
opprobrious epithets; would it be surprising that, 
through mere habit, the most ardent lover of freedom 
fell into some of the despotic ways of those he lived 
amongst ? I am glad to say that I lived too short a 
time in the Russian Rome for it to be seldom if ever 
necessary to me to do as the Romans do ; yet I have 
often been conscious and ashamed of a temptation 
to administer the argument of Mr. Grantley Berkeley 
— the punch on the head— for what would in Eng- 
land have been considered, if an offence at all, one 



MY BED AND BOARD. 317 

only to be visited by a word of reproof ; I have often 
been conscious, and more ashamed, of speaking to 
droschky-drivers, and waiters, and Ivan generally, in 
a manner that, employed towards a cabby or a coally 
in England would have infallibly brought on the 
punching of my head, if not the knocking down of 
my body altogether. 

Of Heyde's more anon ; whether the family vault 
bedroom did or did not contain ghosts, and who the 
fat man was who was smoking the cigarette in the 
balcony, and answered not when I spoke to him. 



XIV. 

MY BED AND BOAED. 



A GREAT writer has somewhere told a story of a 
man about town — Crockey Doyle, was, I think, his 
name — who became very popular in society through 
the talent he possessed for making apologies. He 
would give offence purposely, and be in the wrong 
advisedly, in order to be able to make, afterwards, 
the most charming retractations in the world. No 
one could be long angry with a man who apologized 
so gracefully ; so he became popular accordingly, was 
asked out to dinner frequently ; and was eventually, 
I dare say, popped into a snug berth in the Tare 
and Tret Office. 

I have not the easy eloquence of Crockey Doyle. 



318 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

I am not popular. My most frequent Amphytrions 
are Humphrey, Duke of Glo'ster, or the head of the 
great oriental house of Barmecide and Company. 
And no one, I am sure, would ever dream of giving 
me a place. Yet I am for ever making apologies. 
Like the gambler's servant, who was " always tying 
his shoe ;" like Wych Street, which is always vehicle- 
obstructed ; like a friend of mine, who, whenever I 
meet him, is always going to his tea, and never, 
seemingly accomplishes that repast ; I am always 
apologizing either for the things I have done, or for 
the things I ought to and have not done. I have 
apologized in England, and in France, and in Ger- 
many ; here I am again, a self-accusing clown apol- 
ogizing in St. Petersburg of Russia ; and I have 
little doubt that if I live I shall be apologizing in 
Pekin, or New Orleans, or the Island of Key West. 

My apologies in the present instance are due to 
my readers, firstly, for having loitered and lingered 
outside the door of Heyde's, and for having described 
every thing concerning that hotel save the hotel it- 
self. Secondly, for having placed the words Hand- 
Bell in the large capitals without offering the slightest 
explanation as to why that diminutive tintinnabulum 
should be so suddenly promoted in the typographi- 
cal scale. 

Touching the first, though you might have put me 
down merely as a bore — telling you of things that 
did not interest you, or desirous of spinning a length- 
ened yarn out of one poor thread — or as a simpleton, 
nervous and ashamed, who lingers long in the vesti- 
bule of a mansion in which there is a feast prepared, 



MY BED AND BOARD. 319 

and he invited thereto, and takes his goloshes off 
and on, instead of going up stairs boldly, and making 
his bow to the hostess ; — though this may have been 
your conviction, I had, in truth, a deep-laid and 
subtle design to impress you with a notion of what 
an opposite a Russian is to an English or a conti- 
nental hotel, and how fundamentally Oriental are 
the habits and manners of the people I am cast 
among. The Russian hotel is, in fact, nothing more 
than a Smyrniote or Damascene caravanserai — vast, 
lonely, unclean, thickly peopled, yet apparently de- 
serted, — the same caravanserai, into whose roomy 
courtyard you bring your camels, your asses, and 
your bales of silks, and drugs, and pipes, and Per- 
sian carpets; in whose upper chambers you may 
have equivalents for pilaff and rice, — may go to bed 
afterwards armed, for fear of thieves, and for want 
of them fight with vermin. Heyde's — ^tell it to all 
nations — is clean ; and Heyde's, internally, is Ger- 
man ; but its exterior arrangements have been Rus- 
sianized against the Heydian will ; and its inferior 
valetaille are all Muscovite ; hence the difficulty of 
entrance ; hence the listlessness of the outer domes- 
tics ; hence the necessity of the hand-bell I am 
about to apologize for presently, and which is noth- 
ing more than a substitute for the hand-clapping 
which, in the East, brings the cafegi with the coffee 
and chibouks, and in the Arabian Night's Entertain- 
ments, the forty thousand black slaves with the jars 
of jewels on their heads. 

In* the worst town's worst inn, I will not say 
closest to the mere territorial Russian frontier, but in 



320 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

German Russia — say in Riga or Mittau — there is, 
instantly on the arrival of the modestest bachelor 
traveller, with the compactest of valises, a tremen- 
dous hurry-scurrying to and fro of porters, boots, 
(hausknechts, the Germans call them,) chambermaids, 
waiters, and even landlords. The carillon of a great 
bell sunxmons all these hotel myrmidons from the 
vasty deep of the billiard-room and the corridors as 
soon as your cab-wheels are heard in the courtyard. 
The landlord advances with the stereotyped grin, 
and the traditional hand-rubbing peculiar but com- 
mon to all hotel landlords, from mine host of the 
Garter in England to mine host of the Hotel de 
Londres at Riga. The hausknecht shoulders your 
luggage, and disappears with it before you say 
whether you mean to stop at the hotel or not; 
the portier (pronounced porteer ; tremendous men 
are German porteers — Titans with gold aiguillettes 
on their shoulders, and selling on their own private 
account cigars the choicest, for those who like them,) 
the portier pays your cab, asks your name, and says 
there are no letters for you as yet, (he has never seen 
you before in his life,) but he rather thinks there will 
be, next post. The waiter, or waiters, skimmer 
about undecidedly, but ready for every thing, from an 
order for champagne to an order for a sheet of letter- 
paper ; the chambermaid immediately converts herself 
into a Mont Blanc of towels and a hot spring of Ice- 
land, in the way of cans of boiling water ; the very 
white-vested and night-capped cook peeps through 
the grated window of his kitchen — a prisoner in no 
respect connected with Chillon — and beams on you 



MY BED AND BOARD. 321 

a greasy ray of assurance, that though your dinner 
may be dear and dirty, it shall be hot and oleaginous. 
Finally, the landlord, with the grin and the rubbed 
hands, conducts you in a mincing canter up many 
staircases, and through many corridors ; and you are 
unpassported, unbooted, undressed, and in bed, in 
about the same manner I have described in the last 
chapter. Now, all of this takes place inside Heyde's, 
but not one atom on the exterior thereof. You may 
come in a droschky, or one of the flaming Nevsko'i 
omnibuses — licensed to carry other passengers be- 
sides human ones — or in a hearse, or in the Lord 
Mayor's coach, supposing the transportation of that 
vehicle to be possible ; but not the slightest attention 
will be paid to you, till you get in. You might as 
well be that Mr. Ferguson who was told, that al- 
though other matters might be arranged on an am- 
icable footing, he could not lodge there (wherever 
" there " was) on any consideration. Inside Heyde's 
there is pleasant gnashing of teeth over a good Ger- 
man dinner ; outside Heyde's there is wailing at the 
apparent impossibility of getting any dinner at all. 

But I am inside Heyde's now, and have my bed 
and board there. I stay at Heyde's a month and 
mark its ways, and note them with the informer's 
pen. To have done with the apologies, I hope I 
have explained 'that outer delay on the Heydian 
frontier satisfactorily ; to have done with the hand- 
bell let me tell you that urjless you have your own 
servant with you (and to have a servant I should 
counsel every traveller in Bussia who possesses the 
means ; and if he possess them not, what the deuce 

14* 



322 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

is the good of his travelling in Russia at all ? you 
have not the slightest chance of having any attention 
paid to your wishes as regards refreshment, or any 
thing else unless you tinkle a hand-bell. ^The Rus- 
sians understand wire-bells no more than they do 
chimes ; they must have the immediate and discord- 
ant jingle. It is no good calling " Waiter ! " " Gar- 
9on!" "Tchelovek!" or « Kellner ! "—without the 
bell. Tchelovek, or as the case may be, calls " Sitch- 
ass ! " (directly) but cometh not; but, ring your hand- 
bell (Kolokol) and he is at your beck and call 
instantaneously. He hears and obeys. He will 
bring you any thing. He will stand on his head if 
you gratify him with copecks sufficient. 

Very good to me are my bed and board at 
Heyde's. Cheerful when I wish it. Lonely when 
I so desire it. Let us have the lonely object first. 

I have bought at an Italian artists' colourman's on 
the Nevskoi, un pinceau de Rafaelle^ — a box of 
water-colours, — Newman, Soho Square ; how strange 
the Prince of Wales's plumes and " Ich dien " on 
the cakes look here, in Muscovy! — at a price for 
which I could have purchased a handsome dressing- 
case and fittings, in London and Paris. When I 
am tired of the noise and turmoil of the buffet (for 
I am alone in Russia, as yet, and have very few 
acquaintances and no friends) I retire into the fam- 
ily vault, and make sketches of the strange things 
and people I have seen in the streets. They are 
very much in the penny- valentine manner of art— 
pre-Adamite, rather than pre-Rafaellite. Then I 
make manuscript transcripts of matters Russian that 



MY BED AND BOARD. 323 

have been written on the tables of my memory dur- 
ing the day, on infinitesimal scraps of paper in a 
handwriting whose minuteness causes me not to 
despair of being able to earn my living some day 
by writing the decalogue within the circumference 
of a shilling. These, being desperately afraid — per- 
haps needlessly — of spies and duplicate-key posses- 
sors, I hide furtively in the lining of my hat, won- 
dering whether — as usually happens to me — I shall 
manage to lose my hat in some steamboat-cabin or 
railway-carriage before I land in England, and be 
compelled to purchase in Dover or Brighton (I will 
except Southampton, whose hats are excellent) the 
hardest, heaviest, shiniest of English country-made 
Paris velvet-naps. My last hat was a Dover one, 
and impressed such a bright crimson fillet on my 
forehead that I must have looked, uncovered, like 
the portrait of one of those Jesuit missionaries you 
see in the Propaganda, who have gone to China, 
and have been martyred. There is amalgamated 
with this low art and furtive note-making, a strong 
suspicion of a Turkish chibouk somewhere in the 
room — a real Turkish one, with a cherry-stick tube 
— no mouthpiece (amber is a delusion, save for 
show, — kiss the pure wooden orifice with your own 
lips and let the latakia ascend into your soul to 
soften and enliven it) and a deep red clay bowl, in- 
scribed with fantastic characters in thready-gold and 
as fragile as the tender porcelain — the egg shell 
china — our great grandmothers really delighted in, 
and our contemporaries say they delight in, and 
don't. Also, between this and the Gulf of Bothnia, 



324 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

there is, perhaps, on a table in the family vault, a 
largish tumbler filled with a steaming liquid of a 
golden colour, in which floats a thin slice of lemon. 
It is TEA : the most delicious, the most soothing, the 
most thirst-allaying drink you can smoke withal in 
summer time, and in Russia. But it is not to be 
imagined that, because this tumbler of tea is exqui- 
site, I have foresworn cakes — or ale. 

I have grown to love the family vault; it is 
gloomy, but cool and clean ; it is so large that I am 
continually finding out new walks about it, and con- 
tinually exercising myself in its outlying districts. 
There is a fair quantity of furniture dispersed about 
its roomy suburbs, but this is so thoroughly inade- 
quate, when its size is taken into consideration, that 
were Heyde (represented by Barnabay) to furnish it 
thoroughly, so as to give it an air of being decently 
crowded with movables, I doubt not but that those 
enterprising brothers would be ruined hip and thigh. 

My vault has many windows ; but from every one 
of them I have a (to me) pleasant view. There is 
the kitchen aspect. The kitchen is not on the base- 
ment, but on a first floor, on a level with my vault — 
which, in its mortuary character, should properly be 
on the basement also ; but, in this astonishing land 
they even have their churches one above the other 
in floors : the summer church in the parlour, the 
winter church in the garret. The kitchen's conti- 
guity to me is not near enough to be olfactorily dis- 
agreeable, but near enough for me (with the aid of 
an opera-glass, for I am wellnigh as blind as a 
mole) to descry from my windows interiors that 



MY BED AND BOARD. 325 

would have driven Ostade crazy ; bits of still life 
whose portrayal would have made the fortune of 
Gerard Dow; green-stuffs and salads whose every 
leaf Mieris would have doted on ; effects of firelight 
and daylight combined, from stewpan-laden fur- 
naces, that Schalken would have loved to paint, but 
would have failed in reproducing. 

The cook — rosy, corpulent, and clad in gravy- 
stained white from tasselled nightcap to flapping 
slippers — is a German, a free German — a Hamburg 
man, who but he. He fears nor knout, nor pleiti, 
nor rod, nor stick, nor Siberian pleasure jaunt. He 
is a Canterbury Tale cook to look upon : portly, jo- 
vial, with a rich, husky, real-turtle-soup-bred voice, 
which he ladles from a tureen rather than from his 
throat, and which I hear rolling in rich oily waves 
through the kitchen as he lectures his subordinates 
in bad Russian. He has many subordinates. One 
lank, cadaverous young Teuton, his nephew, who 
came from Cassel, and is always whining to go back 
to Cassel, and who, from the distaste he gives me, 
seeing him putting his fingers into the sauces so often, 
I unequivocatingly wish would go back, to Cassel 
immediately. Two or three bearded acolytes, in the 
usual pink shirts and etceteras, who spill more than 
they cook, and break more than they spill, and are 
not kicked and cuffed for clumsiness, I think, much 
more than they deserve. And, finally, this field mar- 
shal of cooks has a flying cohort of culinary Ama- 
zons, nimble-fingered, quick-witted girls, with col- 
oured kerchiefs on their heads, who fly about from 
point to point, baste, stir, stew, fry, dish up, and it 



326 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

strikes me, do the major part of the cooking at the 
Hotel Heyde. Of course our chief cook's directing 
genius and superintending eye are everything, as to 
flavour. I may here mention a curious example of 
that laziness and desire for an easy, abundant pump- 
kin leading life inherent (through slavery, but to be 
eradicated by freedom) which you find in Ivan the 
moujik and Quashie the nigger. A peasant once 
told me, or rather the gentleman who was interpret- 
ing for me, that of all professions in life he should 
prefer that of head-cook 'in the house of a seigneur; 
for, argued he, what have you to do ? just dip your 
finger in the sauce and lick it, and the babas (the 
women) do all the rest. He had no idea of there 
being any skill in the world save that purely man- 
ual. Sometimes Heyde' s chief cook condescends 
to hold one end of a napkin for straining asparagus- 
.soup purposes. Sometimes it will please his cook- 
ship to go through a light-hearted bit of legerdemain 
with two stewpans; but his ordinary position is 
with his broad back against the dresser, and his 
broad face turned towards the chief furnace, a paper 
cigarette between his pulpy lips (he smokes in the 
kitchen, this bold cook) and a tall tankard of real 
Bavarian beer (they have it real at Heyde's) by his 
side. Who expects field-marshals to head armies 
as well as direct their movements ? Our Welling- 
ton, to be sure, was fond of exposing his life, and 
William of Orange was only tolerable and in good 
humour when he was in immediate personal danger. 
But Napoleon sat in a chair in the rear of Water- 
loo's carnage till he mounted that famous pale horse 



MY BED AND BOARD. 327 

to fly from it. Edward the Third witnessed the 
battle of Crecy from a windmill, and Louis the Fif- 
teenth had his wig dressed while his household 
troops were charging the English guards. Our cook 
looks on, directs, but does not fight. Who can carry 
the baton of marshal and Brown Bess at the same 
time ? 

There is always a prodigious laughing and scream- 
ing, and, if truth must be told — romping — going on 
in this kitchen. The chief cook himself is a gay 
man, and flings his handkerchief to one of the ker- 
chiefed damsels ; the girls generally keep up a shrill 
clamour of tongues, to which the noise of a well- 
stocked poultry-yard, where Cochin- Chinas in good 
health and voice are not wanting, may serve as a 
comparison. I am of opinion that the Cassel-sick 
German (who is evidently a misanthrope) hits them 
occasionally with saucepans, or otherwise abuses 
them, for the prattle and laughter frequently change 
to sounds unmistakably those of invective and an- 
ger ; and there is one young lady, very ugly she is, 
(I have her now under the lens of my opera-glass,) 
who discourses so loudly on some real or fancied 
grievance, with such vehement gesticulation and 
such frenzied utterance, that I am apprehensive, 
every moment, she will fall down in a fit. But she 
does not — thinking, perhaps, that were she to do so, 
she would be brought to her senses by the outward 
application of melted butter or hot gravy. 

This cook, I learn, when I am not in the solitude 
of the family vault, is an excellent artist. If you 
make him a present of a blue bill — say five roubles 



328 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

— and order a dinner — say for self and friends — he 
will cook you a repast succulent enough to make a 
bear leave off honey ; which expression may be taken 
as equivalent to our " good enough to make a cat 
speak." He has one little fault : this. After any 
extra exertion in the culinary line, he departs in a 
droschky to the house of a friend of his, likewise a 
German and a tailor, who resides in a remote Pere- 
oulok in the neigbourhood of the Alexander- Nevskoi" 
convent, and there for three or more days and nights 
inebriates himself with Brantwein or corn brandy, 
specially imported from Germany by his sartorial 
friend : blowing a trumpet from time to time as a 
relaxation. Meanwhile, the culinary arrangements 
are under the control of the misanthrope who 
wants to go back to Cassel, and the dinners are 
very bad. 

Another view I have, of a huge court-yard, sur- 
rounded by staring walls — all belonging to Heyde 
— round which run pent-houses or sheds, and be- 
neath which are harboured droschkies, whose gaber- 
dined drivers snore on box and bench till a pink- 
shirted messenger comes to pummel them into 
action, and tell them that a fare is waiting for them. 
The roofs of these pent-houses are leaded, and on 
them (how keeping their perpendicular I know 'not) 
more kerchiefed women are beating carpets ; they 
beat carpets at Heyde's — tell it again to the nations 
— with willow rods ; and more pink-shirted men are 
thrashing the dust out of fur pelisses, or peacefully 
slumbering on their diaphragms in the sunshine. 
Another view I have, through a window, and round 



MY BED AND BOiWRD. 829 

a corner, of a strip of thoroughfare between two 
blocks of houses, which from the droschkies, the 
gray-coated soldiers, and the clouds of dust, must 
be either the Cadetten-Linie, or the Line (or street) 
parallel to it. And last of all, I can peep into a 
little private court-yard — I suspect the one apper- 
taining to Barnabay's own separate and special 
apartments — where two little children, a boy and 
a girl, are gravely exercising themselves on stilts. 
Stilts in Russia ! 

Stilts in Russia ; and why not more than these ? 
for as, dazed with the blinding sunlight, I come into 
the gloomy interior of the family vault, and cast 
myself into an easy old arm-chair, (it would hold 
two with comfort,) I hear from a wandering band 
that have just entered the Balschoi-dvor, or great 
court-yard, first the hacknied but always delightful 
strains of the Trovatore, and then — ^but I must be 
dreaming — no ; they are actually playing it, She 
wore a Wreath of Roses. 

I see it all now. I have only been a few miles 
away from town to write this journey. Due North 
is but the North Kent Railway : this is Dumble- 
downdeary, not Wassily-Ostrow : the Shoulder of 
Mutton Inn and . not Heyde's Hotel. Be it as it 
may, it is extremely hot ; and if there be any law 
in Russia or in Kent against taking a siesta in the 
middle of the day, I have violated it. I go fast 
asleep, and live a life I never shall live fifteen hun- 
dred miles away ; then wake to hear the cook's bad 
Russian, and to find the sun a trifle lower in the 
heaven. 



330 A JCytJRNBY DUE NORTH. 

This is the time for a gondola on the Neva ; so I 
leave the family vault to the ghosts, and Heyde's to 
its devices. 



XV. 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 



They do, certainly, see a great deal of Life at 
Heyde's. There is a convivial phrase, called, " keep- 
ing it up," which the Heydians seem perfectly well 
acquainted with, and act upon to a tremendous 
extent. K I come home from a ball very late,— 
or rather very early — say four o'clock in the morn- 
ing, I find the jovial men who dwell at Heyde's just 
sitting down to supper, and ordering tankards of 
strong beer, (they have the genuine Baerisch here, 
and it costs thirty copecks — a shilling a pint,*) as a 

* There is a very excellent beer (Pivd) brewed at Moscow, 
wbich is (being Russian) of course abandoned to the moujiks. 
Nous Autres are very fond of Dublin bottled stout. At Domi- 
nique's cafe, on the Nevoskoi, feeling one night athirst for beer, 
I asked for and obtained a pint bottle of the brown and frothy 
beverage that has made the name of Guinness famous all over 
the world. For this same pint bottle of beer I was charged the 
small sum of one rouble — three and twopence. An English gen- 
tleman, long resident in l^ussia, and intimately conversant with 
things Muscovite, has since told me that I had been swindled, and 
that I ought not to have been mulcted in more than half a rouble. 
However, I know that I paid it ; and the consciousness of having 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 331 

preparative for subsequent sound and steady drink- 
ing. If I emerge from the family vault, to dine, to 
smoke, to " coffecate " myself, or to read the news- 
papers, still find I the Heydians keeping it up with 
unabated and unwearied joviality. All night long 
too, — at least whenever I wake during that season 
when deep sleep should fall upon men, but falleth 
not, alas, upon me ! — I hear the clicking of the balls 
in the billiard-room, the shouts of the conquerors, 
the " Gleich, gleich ! " or " Sitchasse ! sitchasse ! " 
(Coming! coming !) of the waiters. In the morning, 
going into the cafe to breakfast I find the brothers 
Barnabay with pale faces and encrimsoned eyelids, 
telling dreadful tales of long keeping it up ; and as 
for Zacharai, he has kept it up, I imagine, so long 
that he is now kept down — ^in bed — and does not 
appear at all. Finding this widely-spread determi- 
nation to keep things up ; and being rather tired of 
loneliness and keeping my room — or vault — it occurs 
to me to keep it up too ; so I go into the public 
world of Heyde's, and see what it is made of. 

In that rapid, scurrying journey I took when the 
two Ischvostchiks brought me here, I spoke of the 
spacious apartments I had traversed. In these the 
Heydians keep it up, by night and by day, and in 
this wise. 

There is the Buffet or caf^, call it what you will 
— the Bar I call it. It is not- unHke a railway re- 
been cheated out of fifty copecks did not give me much more sat- 
isfaction than, I imagine, the worthy Justice Shallow experienced 
when Sir John Falstaff was good enough to inform him that he 
owed him a thousand pounds. 



332 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

freshment-room ; for, traversing it longitudinally, 
there is a bar or counter, laden with comestibles. 
No soup, no scalding water discoloured and mis- 
called tea, no pork pies or sausage rolls, however, 
here recall memories of Wolverton and Swindon. 
The counter stores at Heyde's consist of that by 
me abhorred, by others adored, condiment, caviare : 
caviare simple, in little yellow hooped kegs : caviare 
spread on bread and butter : caviare artfully intro- 
duced between layers of pastry. Then there are all 
the dried, and smoked, and pickled fishes, on little 
crusts of bread, like what we call tops and bottoms ; 
all the condiments in the way of spiced and mari- 
naded meats, highly -peppered sausages, and Russian 
substitutes for our brawn and collared viands ; of 
which I have already spoken, as being purchasable 
in the refreshment-room of the Cronstadt pyroscaphe. 
There are crabs, too, and craw-fish, and some mys- 
terious molluscs floating in an oleaginous pickle, 
and which, shell for shell, and saucer for saucer, 
bear a curious family likeness to those immortal 
WHELKS that, displayed on stalls, supported by kid- 
ney puddings and hot eel-soup, were once the great- 
est glories of the pillars of Clement's Inn. 

Now, all these condiments are simply incentives 
to appetite. You, who have travelled in Denmark 
and Sweden, know that in private as well as public 
houses, such buffets or counters are set out, and 
that dinner is invariably prefaced by a mouthful of 
caviare or salted fish, and a dram of raw spirits. 
We have but a very faint reflex of this epigastrium- 
spurring custom in Western Europe : — in France, 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 333 

in the oysters and chabli§ (or Sauterne) by which a 
dinner Men monte is preceded ; in England, in the 
glass of sherry and bitters, in which gastronomes 
will sometimes indulge before dinner. In Russia, 
dram-drinking and condiment-eating preparatory to 
the prandial meal are customs very widely dissem- 
inated. In every restaurant you find such a counter 
— in every wealthy merchant's house. In old Rus- 
sian families too — noble families, I mean — there are 
the buffet, the caviare, and the drams ; it is only 
among the tip-top specimens of Nous Autres — the 
great counts and princes, in whose magnificent 
saloons you forget (for a moment) that you are 
among savages, and believe yourself to be in the 
Faubourg St. Germain, that you find a disdain of 
this homely, Sclavonic, tippling custom. The dram 
and fish buffet is abolished, the dinner is served 
according to the jnost approved models set forth by 
Ude and Careaae ; but even under these circum- 
stances a slight innovation upon the Median and 
Persian discipline of a Parisian cuisine takes place. 
The apparently exiled drams and condiments are 
handed round to the guests by stealthy lacqueys. 
This is a mean, furtive, underhanded way, I take 
it, of drinking one's " morning," or rather " evening." 
We can excuse him who takes his grog honestly, 
manfully, openly ; but what shall we say of the sur- 
reptitious toper who creeps home to bed, hides the 
gin-bottle under the pillow, and gets up to drink 
drams while honest men are sound asleep. In the 
United States of America, I have heard that pickled 
oysters and small cubes of salted cod are frequently 



334 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

to be met with on the marble bars of the palatial 
hotels ; but I am given to understand, that they are 
regarded less as incentives to eating, than as provo- 
catives to drinking. It is well known that it is 
impossible for our Transatlantic cousins to annex 
the Universe, rig the market for the millennium, and 
chaw up, whip, and burst up creation generally, 
without a given number of " drinks " (some authori- 
ties say fifty, some seventy-five) per diem. It hap- 
pens sometimes that the Democratic stomach grows 
palled, the Locofoco digestive organs shaky, the 
Hard Shell nerves in an unsatisfactory condition. 
It is then that the pickled oysters and salted cod 
whets come into requisition. I wonder that some 
of the enterprising aides-de-camp to Bacchus — the 
ginshop and tavern keepers of London — do not 
take a leaf from the Russo- American book! Dried 
sprats might cause the " superior cream gin " to go 
off gayly, and little slabs of kippered-salmon might 
cause an immense augmentation in the demand for 
the " Gatherings of Long John," or the " Real Glen- 
livat," or the " Genuine L. L." As it is, broiled 
bones, cayenned kidneys, and devilled biscuits, are 
luxuries confined to the rich. Why should the 
middle and lower classes be deprived of the same 
facilities for the descent of that Avernus which 
leads to the devil, as are enjoyed by their more for- 
tunate brethren ? 

As, in a " Journey Due North," it is competent for 
me, I hope, to notice the peculiarities of the coun- 
tries one may traverse before reaching the Ultima 
Thule, I may mention that, in the taverns and beer- 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 835 

houses of Belgium and Holland, although no con- 
diments are sold at the bar, women and boys are 
continually circulating round the tables with bas- 
kets, in which are hard-boiled eggs, crawfish, and 
sometimes periwinkles, which they offer for sale to 
the beer-drinkers. 

Although Heyde's is a German hotel, and the 
younger Barnabay tells me that he is a Lutheran, 
there is in the buffet the ordinary inevitable joss, or 
saint's image. He is a very seedy saint, very tar- 
nished and smoke-blackened, and they have hung 
him up very high indeed, in one corner. He is so 
little thought of, that Heyde's is the only public 
room I yet know in Petersburg, in which the guests 
sit, habitually, with their hats on. Nowhere else, 
in shop, lavka, Angliski or K-uski Magazin, would 
such a thing be tolerated. The hat goes off as soon 
as one goes into any place sanctified by the pres- 
ence of the joss. When I go to buy a pair of 
gloves, or a book, or a quire of paper, I take off my 
hat reverentially ; for is not Saint Nicholas, or Saint 
Waldemar, glowering at me from among bales of 
goods or cardboard boxes, blushing with the bright- 
est paint, and winking with all his jewels, real or 
sham ! The shopkeeper I know expects it. I hope 
he appreciates the respect which I, a heretic and 
pig, pay to his harmless superstitions. The joss at 
Heyde's is hung there, not because Heyde or any of 
its foregathering belong to the Greek Church, but 
because the place is frequented indifferently by 
Germans and Russians, and the latter might take 
offence at the absence of the religious symbol. 



336 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

The same deference to the dominant party may be 
observed in numbers of the shops kept by foreigners 
in St. Petersburg. Perfumers from Lyons, tailors 
from Vienna, linendrapers from London, milliners 
from Paris, statuette-sellers from Milan, bow and 
are silent in the presence of the stick. In the fash- 
ionable modistes on the Nevskoi and in the Balschoi 
Morskaia it is by no means uncommon to see a 
really magnificent saint's image, blazing with gild- 
ing and tinsel, and enshrined in costly lace. There 
is nothing like burning a candle to St. Nicholas — 
old St. Nicholas, I mean. 

Mentioning what I supposed in my first crude 
notions of Russian manners to be a custom gen- 
erally prevalent in Russia, that of taking off" the hat, 
and remaining uncovered, while in any room or shop 
in which there was a saint's image, I have now, 
however, to confess that before I left Russia^ my 
ideas on the subject underwent a considerable 
change. I had a great deal of shopping to get 
through before leaving St. Petersburg, principally 
with a view to the purchase of curiosities for anx- 
ious friends at home ; and as foreigners always have 
about three times more to pay for what they pur- 
chase than Russians have, I always took care to 
secure the services of a Russian acquaintance, to 
whom I confided my pocket-book and shopping 
commissions. It was a source of much chuckling 
to me to see my Muscovite agent beat down, higgle, 
haggle, and barter, with some merchant in the Gos- 
tinnoi-dvor, — say for a writing-case, an embroidered 
sash, or a model samovar, of which I wished- to 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 337 

become the possessor, and when he had ultimately 
come to terms and secured the article at perhaps a 
tenth of the price originally demanded for it, to 
watch the rage of the merchant when my Russian 
friend laughingly informed him that the sash or the 
portmanteau was for an Angliski. I noticed in 
these shopping excursions that my Russian acquaint- 
ances, whether they were wearers of the cloak, of the 
tchinovnik, or the gray capote of the guardsman, 
never removed their caps when they entered a shop, 
however prominent the saintly image might be. I 
asked one of Nous Autres one day, as gently and 
discreetly as I could, why he departed from what I 
had conceived to be an inviolable custom ? " Par- 
bleu ! " he answered, " who is to tell us to uncover 
ourselves? The Gassudar? Bon! but the Tchorni- 
Narod — the black people — the fellows who sell soap 
and leather. Allans done I " This gentleman was 
right in his generation. Who indeed, in a country 
where we are every thing, is to bid us to be uncov- 
ered? Fancy a lizard telling a crocodile that he 
opened his mouth too wide. 

Touching upon hats — though still at Heyde's : I 
think this is not the worst of places to observe that 
the Russians are the greatest hat-lifters in the world. 
They need build their hats, as they do, of a species 
of brown paper covered with a silk or beaver nap ; 
for were the brims of any hard material, they would 
inevitably be worn out after one day's course of 
salutations. Everybody takes off his hat, cap, hel- 
met, or shako, to everybody. The Emperor takes 
his off to begin with, when he bids his hundred 
15 



338 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

thousand " children " good morning at a review. 
The humblest moujik, meeting another as humble 
as he, takes oif his hat and bows low. If very 
drunk, he not only takes off his hat and bows lower, 
but positively refuses to be covered till the interview 
be terminated, and continues bowing and bowing 
like the Chinese Tombolas we used to see on man- 
tel pieces. The hat, indeed, is much more off the 
head than on. 

And what manner of men are the midday, and 
the midnight, and-not-going-home-till-morning, rev- 
ellers at Heyde's ? There are portly German mer- 
chants from Leipsic and Stettin, come to buy or see ; 
there are keen, dressy, dandified Hamburgers — no 
thumb-ringed, slow-going, sauerkraut-eating Ger- 
mans these — ^but men who combine business with 
pleasure, and, speculating feverishly in corn and 
hides and tallow all day, drink and smoke and dance 
and play dominoes and billiards, and otherwise dissi- 
pate themselves, all night. What lives ! Wondrous 
travellers are these Hamburg men. They know all 
the best hotels and best tables d'hote all over the 
continent. They talk familiarly of Glasgow and 
Dublin, Wolverhampton and Cheltenham. Their 
Paris they know by heart ; and there is another 
country they are strangely acquainted with — Italy ; 
not artistic Italy, musical Italy, religious Italy, but 
commercial Italy. One Hamburger tells me about 
Venice. He touches not on St. Mark's square, the 
Bridge of Sighs, or the Bucentaur. He confines his 
travelling reminiscences to the custom-house regula- 
tions, and the navigation dues exacted by the Lorn- 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 839 

bardo Venetian government. He has had ventures 
to Leghorn, and has done a pretty stroke of business 
at Naples, and has an agent at Palermo. I would 
call him a Goth, but that it is much better to call 
him a Hamburger. Then there are German ship- 
brokers, German sharebrokers, and a few of the 
wealthier German tradesmen of St. Petersburg, who 
come here to quaff their nightly bumpers, and play 
their nightly games at dominoes. The Russian ele- 
ment consists of students from the University of St. 
Petersburg, and pupils from the Ecole de Droit, 
(equivalent to our English law students,) and these 
alumni wear cocked hats and swords. Some of 
these days I am certain the Russian government in 
its rage for making every thing military will insist 
upon the clergy wearing cocked hats and swords ; 
we shall have the Archbishop of Novgorod in a 
shako, and the patriarch Nikon in a cocked hat. 
Finally, there are a few Russian officers, but not 
guardsmen. Heyde's is not aristocratic enough for 
them ; and the Russian officers of the line, though 
all noble ex officio^ are as poor as Job. 

It is among these motley people that I begin to 
see life, and smoke paper cigars, and play billiards 
(badly), and talk indifferent French and worse Ger- 
man, and a few words of Russian, at which my 
acquaintances laugh. For I have made acquaint- 
ances already, athough no friends. 

An acquaintance with whom I have already ad- 
journed once or twice to the condiment-counter, and 
whom I am now even attempting to initiate into the 
mysteries of the recondite game of cribbage, (our 



340 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

cribbage-board is a sheet of paper in which we stick 
pins,) is a gentleman whose name, inasmuch as he 
holds, I presume, to this day, an official appointment 
under the imperial government, I will veil with the 
classical pseudonym of Cato the Censor. Cato is a 
gross fat man, an amalgam of puddings, a mountain 
of flesh ; when I meet him abroad, as I do some- 
times, having twenty -five copecks-worth of droschky, 
I pity the Ischvostchik, and the horse, and the drosch- 
ky springs, (had they sense to be pitiable,) and (pro- 
spectively) Cato the Censor himself, were he to fall 
off that ominously-oscillating vehicle. For, who 
could pick him up again — a shattered fat man ? A 
crane might do it, or Archimedes' lever, or a pair of 
dock-yard shears, but not mortal Boutotsnik or 
Police-soldier. "When Cato laughs, his fat sides 
wag ; when he sits on one of Heyde's chairs, I trem- 
ble for that chair ; when he walks on Heyde's floor, 
the boards creak with the agony of this oppression 
of fat ; and I expect every moment to see Cato sink 
through the basement as through a trap-door. 

Cato the Censor is a Tchinovnik, and wears a 
civilian's uniform, (that seems a paradox, but it is 
not one in a land where everybody wears a uniform,) 
to wit, dark green with double-eagle buttons, gilt. 
When abroad he wears a long cloak with a cape, 
and a cap with a green band, and a curious white- 
and-blue disk in front, half button, half cockade, 
but wholly Chinese. I believe it to be competent 
for the Tchinovniks to wear, if they choose, a tunic ; 
but Cato, with the usual fatuity of fat men, wears 
a tail-coat with the slimest and scantiest of tails, 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 341 

the shortest of sleeves, and the tightest of waists. 
Fat men, properly, should wear togas ; and yet you 
find them almost always inveterately addicted to 
zephyr jackets. Cato has a round, sleek, bullet head, 
very small feet in the tightest of patent boots — so 
small that they continually disturb my notions of 
the centre of gravity, and make me fear that, Cato's 
balance not being right, he must needs topple over — 
and very large, fat, soft, beefy hands, whose princi- 
pal use and employment we shall presently discover. 
For, why Cato the Censor ? Thus much : that 
this fat Russian is one of the employes in the Im- 
perial " Bureau de Censure," (I do not know, and it 
would be no use telling you its Russian name,) and 
it is his duty to read through every morning, every 
line of every foreign newspaper that now lies on 
Heyde's table, and to blot out every subversive ar- 
ticle, every democratic paragraph, every liberal word, 
every comma or semicolon displeasing to the auto- 
cratic regime of the Czar of Stickland. For in- 
stance, Heyde's takes in the Illustrated London 
News, the Illustrated Times, (that other Times, 
which is not illustrated, is rigorously tabooed,) the 
Constitutionnel, the Journal des D^bats, the Brussels 
Nord, the German Illustrieter Zeitung, and that 
quaint little Berlinese oposcule the Kladderadatch. 
These, with a Hamburg commercial sheet, and a 
grim little cohort of St. Petersburg gazettes and 
journals, which, for the political news they contain, 
might just as well be sheets of blank paper, are the 
only intellectual food we are allowed to consume at 
Heyde's. Cato of course knows all languages ; and 



342 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

he goes through these papers patiently and labori- 
ously, at his own private bureau in the censor's office. 
When the journals have been properly purified, he 
and an under-clerk, a sort of gargon de bureau, bear- 
ing the mental food, come down to Heyde's ; the 
under-clerk deposits the newspapers on the reading- 
table, liquors at the condiment counter, and, I am 
inclined to think, receives, from time to time, some 
small gratuities in the way of copecks, from Bar- 
nabay. He departs, and Cato the Censor, forgetting, 
or at least sinking for the time his official capacity? 
sinks at once into Cato the convivialist, and keeps it 
up till the small hours, as gayly and persistently as 
the most jovial of the Heydians. 

Formerly, the censorship of foreign journals was 
performed by means of simple excision. The prun- 
ing-knife, or rather the axe, as Mr. Puff would say, 
was employed ; and the objectionable passages were 
ruthlessly cut out ; the excised journal presenting, in 
its mutilated condition, a lamentable appearance of 
raggedness, " windowed," if not looped. You had 
to grin through the bars of such a newspaper, and, 
knowing that you were in prison, long for the free- 
dom outside and over the window. In time, how- 
ever, some beneficent minister of police (the censure 
falls naturally within his attribute) discovered that 
the bodily cutting out of part of a column, involved 
not only the loss of the reverse side to the reader — 
which might very likely be only a harmless narrative 
of " extraordinary longevity in a cat," but also pos- 
sibly destroyed some matter favourable directly or 
indirectly to the interests of Holy Russia — ^thus cut- 



I BEGIN TO SEE LIFE. 348 

ting off the Czar's own nose, as well as the baneful 
branches from the tree of liberty. So, a new plan 
was adopted. The heretical matter was " blacked " 
or blocked out, by a succession of close stampings 
with black ink upwards, downwards, backwards, for- 
wards and diagonally, — exactly as the grain of a 
steel plate for mezzotinto is raised by a " rocking- 
tool " — till every offending cross to a t or dot to an i 
was obliterated. The appearance of a newspaper 
thus blocked out is very wonderful. Sometimes a 
whole column becomes as dark as Erebus ; some- 
times one paragraph in an article of foreign intelli- 
gence will disappear; sometimes two lines and a 
half in a critical article on a purely literary subject, 
perhaps three columns in length, will assume an 
Ethiopian hue ; sometimes one line in an advertise- 
ment will be numbered with the wonders of typog- 
raphy that were. The immediate why and where- 
fore of all this, lies with Cato the Censor. He is 
" Sir Oracle," and no literary dog dare bark at him. 
Sometimes a few of the old Heydians [but not 
Russians you may be sure] banter him playfully as 
to his morning's corrections ; ask him if he took too 
much " ponche " over night, and, waking up in a 
bad humour that morning, had gone to work sav- 
agely with the blacking stamp — I had nearly said 
bottle — or whether he had been sent for by the Min- 
ister of Police and told that he had been far too 
lenient lately, and must stamp out several degrees 
more rigorously in future ? When bantered, too se- 
verely the fat man loses his temper, throws over his 
dominoes, casts grim official glances at his tor- 



344 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

mentors as though he would very much like to be 
Cato the Censor of men as well as words, and stamp 
out a few of the Heydians for their insolence. 

A remarkable and very puzzling peculiarity in this 
absurd and useless system of censorship, is the fact 
that paragraphs positively rampant in their demo- 
cratic and throne-subversive tendency are very fre- 
quently left untouched, and are visible to the naked 
eye. Whether this occurs through mere careless- 
ness and oversight on the fat man's part, or through 
some deep and subtle design of the fat man's supe- 
riors to let certain things be known, while others are 
to be enveloped in obscurity, I am perfectly unable 
to state ; but such is the fact. Just before I left 
Russia the affairs of Naples were beginning to at- 
tract attention. The probability of a rupture be- 
tween the Western powers and the " Padrone asso- 
luto" of the Lazzaroni was being freely discussed. 
The papers talked of the imminent arrival of an 
allied squadron in the Neapolitan waters; of the 
wrongs of Poerio ; of the ripeness of the people for 
revolt ; of the atrocities of the wretched Ferdinand, 
and his sobriquet of " King Bomba ; " of the bar- 
barities of the bastinade and the dungeons of Cas- 
erta and Ischia. All this was left untouched. I 
think, myself, that the Eussian Government, in its 
dealings with newspapers, is much more afraid of 
ideas than of facts. It assumes it to be impossible 
for its reading subjects to be ignorant of the moon's 
rotation ; but it does not wish them to know why it 
rotates, or, at least, to speculate on this or any other 
subject. Speculation might lead to inquiries as to 



HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY. 345 

the why and the wherefore of the Stick, the Police, 
Slavery, the Passport system, non-representation, an 
irresponsible government — nay, ultimately, to imper- 
tinent queries as to the cause and effect of the high 
and mighty and omnipotent Czar himself. 



XVI. 

HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY. 

Perhaps Xhristovskoi — perhaps Cristofski; but, 
that it is an island in the Neva, and that there are 
high jinks there, I know. When the lexicological 
and harmonic value of the thirty-six letters in the 
Russian alphabet shall find a compensating equiva- 
lent, and shall be adequately represented by the pov- 
erty stricken twenty-six we Western barbarians pos- 
sess, I shall be able, I hope, to get on better with 
my Sclavonic orthography; and philologists will 
cease to gird at me for not spelling correctly words 
for which there is no definite rule correctly to spell 
— will cease to denounce me for violating the law, 
when that law is yet a Lex non scripta. 

This is the twenty -first of June — old, or Russian 
style ; and Saint John's Day — Midsummer, in fact. 
Even as the little boys in England have by this time 
come home for the holidays ; so have the big and 
little boys who wear the spiked helmets, and swords, 
and cocked hats, before their time in St. Petersburg, 

15 * 



846 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

come home for their Midsummer holidays. From 
the first, and second, and third cadet corps; from 
the school of imperial pages, and the corps des 
Porte-Enseignes de la Garde; from the School of 
Mines, and the School of Forests, and the School 
of Roads and Bridges, and the School of Artillery, 
and the School of Fireworks and Blue Blazes, 
(which last educational establishment I have been 
led impatiently to surmise, so numerous are the 
military schools in Russia,) from all these gymnasia, 
teeming with future heroes burning to be thrashed 
at future Inkermanns, have come the keen-eyed, 
multi-faced, multi-langued (which is heraldic, though 
scarcely Johnsonian, as an epithet) Russians. I 
have scratched the Russ thoroughly to-night, and 
have found an immense quantity of Tartar beneath 
his epidermis. Alexis Hardshellovitch is here, home 
for the holidays, his head bigger than ever, and as 
few brains as ever inside it. Genghis Khan is 
here, with his white-kid gloves, his Parisian accent, 
and his confounded mare's milk and black sheepskin 
tent countenance. There is, to be brief, a mob of 
lads in uniform to tea this Midsummer night ; the 
antechamber is full of helmets and cocked-hats, un- 
dress caps and swords, belts and sashes, and marine 
cadets' dirks ; while the outer atrium or vestibule is 
a perfect grove of cloaks with red collars, and gray 
capotes with double-eagle buttons. 

For, the kindest lady in the world is samovarising, 
otherwise, entertaining us at tea to-night in her 
mansion in the Mala Millionnaia — otherwise La pe- 
tite Millionne — why million, why little — for it is a 



HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY. 347 

much broader street than Portland Place — I know 
not. The windows are all open ; and as there are a 
good many apartments en suite, and a good many 
windows to each, no man has as yet been suffo- 
cated ; though the heat of the day last past was 
full of promise that the desirable asphyxiating con- 
summation in question w^ould occur somewhere or 
to somebody before midnight. We have made a 
famous tea ; and one marine cadet has consumed, 
to my knowledge, twelve tumblers-full of that cheer- 
ing, but not inebriating beverage. Alexis Hardshel- 
lovitch has overeaten himself as usual, on raspber- 
ries and cream,* and a professor of natural history 
in the University of Moscow — a tremendous savant, 
but strangely hail fellow well met with these school 
lads — has been cutting thin bread and butter since 
ten p. M. The samovar has grown so hot that it 
scorches those who approach it, and blights them 
like an upas tree ; so the guests give it a wide berth, 
and form a circle round it ; though the heroic lady 

* The Russian raspberries are delicious, full-sized, juicy, and 
luscious, and devoid of that curious furry dryness, that to me 
make western raspberries as deceptive and annoying to the pal- 
ate as the apples of the Dead Sea. In England, a raspberry, to 
my mind, is only to be tolerated — like the midshipman, who was 
hated by the purser — in a pie ; but in Russia it is a bulb of thirst- 
allaying delight. The Russian strawberries, on the other hand, 
are execrable — ^little niminy-piminy, shrunken, weazened atomies, 
like Number-six shot run to seed, and blushing at their own de- 
crepitude. I have seen hot-house strawberries, not in the fruit- 
markets, but in the grea,t Dutch fruiterers' shops in the Nevskoi. 
Three roubles, sixteen shillings, was the moderate price asked for 
a basket containing half-a-dozen moderately-sized strawberries. 



348 . A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

of the house still continues to do battle with it, at 
arm's length, and keeps up filling tumblers of tea 
and slicing lemons thereinto, regardless of trouble 
or expense. There are so many guests, and they 
are distributed in such an eccentric manner, that the 
two servants in waiting have long since abandoned 
— as a thing 'impossible of accomplishment — the 
practice of handing each visitor his own particular 
cup of tea. They come round with the tray and 
the tumblers ; and the noble Russians make Cos- 
sack forays upon them. It is every man for himself, 
and tea for us all. 

Start not, reader, nor, deeming our spirits fled, 
think that we are all men-folk in the suite of apart- 
ments in the Mala Million nai'a, samov arizing on the 
bounty of the kindest lady in the world. Besides 
that good soul, who has lived for others all the daya 
of her life, and shall assuredly continue to live for 
others when this turbid phantasm is over — but those 
others shall be angels for whom she shall live to be 
loved by them, and who will keep time to her cloud- 
pressing footsteps with harps of gold — besides the 
good woman, we are sanctified, this Midsummer 
night, by the presence of wise, and good, and beau- 
tiful women. We have the Queen of Sheba, radi- 
ant in the majesty of her haughty comeliness, proud, 
defiant, outwardly, but, ah! so tender, so loving 
within — ?i warrior's cuirass filled with custard (this 
is the same Queen of Sheba you heard about in 
connection with the Nevskoi" perspective, a late in- 
terview, and a certain gent in a white-top coat) ; we 
have this fair woman, to whom Minerva stood god- 



HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY. . 349 

mother, but whom Venus stole away in her infancy, 
like a gipsy as she is, to adopt her, practising the 
trill at an Erard's grand pianoforte, under the guid- 
ance of the famous St. Peterburgian Italian music- 
master Fripanelli (this is not the' etiolated old Frip- 
anelli you wot of in Tattyboy's Rents, but his 
prosperous brother Benedetto Fripanelli, who emi- 
grated from the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom soon 
after some Carbonari troubles in eighteen hundred 
and twenty-two — ostensibly because he was politi- 
cally compromised, actually because he could not 
gain bread, olives, or rosolio — nay, not in Milan — 
nay, not in Bergamo — nay, not in Venice ; and 
makes his six thousand roubles per annum in Pe- 
tersburg now by persuading princesses that they can 
sing.) 

The Principle of Evil, if we are to believe the 
old legends, suffers, among other deprivations, under 
the curse of banishment from Harmony. The devil 
has no ear. He cannot sing second. Counterpoint 
is a dead letter to him. Base as he may be, thor- 
ough bass is a sealed book to him. He is never 
more to hear the music of the spheres. Goethe has 
wonderfully implied this in the discordant jangling 
of the sound of Mephistopheles' speeches. After 
the Spirit of Negation has spoken one of his devil- 
ish diatribes, the accents of Faust fall upon the ear 
like honey. Humanum est errare in the case of 
Faust ; but the devU cannot err, because he cannot, 
in any case, be right. He who commences nothing, 
cannot be tardy in finishing his work. It seems a 
certain curse upon the Russian aristocracy that they, 



350 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

too, have no ear. They cannot sing in tune ; the 
only melody they are capable of accomplishing is 
the tune the cow died of. I happened to mix much, 
while in Russia, in musical and operatic circles — 
of which, specially, I shall have to say something in 
the course of this wayward journey. The Russian 
ladies insist upon learning the most difficult mor- 
ceaux from the most difficult operas. Where an 
angel would fear to tread in the regions of Wapping 
Old Stairs, the Princess PiccoliminikofF will rush in 
with Casta Diva. They (the ladies) are admirable, 
nay, scientific musicians. They are wonderful pian- 
istes — but always in a hard, ringy, metallic manner, 
without one particle of soul ; they are marvellous 
executantes vocally, and can do as much, perhaps, 
in the way of roulades and fioriture, as the most un- 
approachable Italian singer ; but sing in time, or 
tune (especially,) they cannot. " Tout ga chante 
fauxP (" They all sing false,") a music-master told 
me at Count StrogonofF's, pointing to the whole co- 
hort of musical ladies gathered round a pianoforte. 
On the other hand the brutish, enslaved, unmusic- 
mastered people are essentially melodious. I have 
heard in villages Russian airs sung to the strumming 
of the Balalaika, or Russian lute, with a purity of 
intonation and truth of expression, that would make 
many of our most admired ballad-singers blush. 

To the Queen of Sheba is joined a timid little 
fluttering fawn of a thing — one Mademoiselle Na- 
diejda. Nadiejda what? Well, I will say Dash. 
Mademoiselle Dash (the Christian name is a pretty 
and tender one, and signifies, in the English Ian- 



HIGH JINKS AT CHEISTOFFSKY. 351 

guage Hope (is one, well, not of those rarm aves, 
but certainly of those pearls beyond price, Russian 
pretty girls. She is not beautiful ; the Russian beau- 
ties are either of Circassian, Georgian, or Mingre- 
lian origin — dark-eyed, dark skinned, full bee-stung 
lipped, and generally Houri-looking ; or they are the 
rounded German-Frauleins — from Esthonia, Livo- 
nia, and Courland : North German beauties, in fact, 
and you must have travelled with me, unavailingly, 
all this way Due North, if you do not know, by this 
time, what a handsome young German lady is like. 
Nadiejda is a pretty girl — a white one. She was not 
printed in fast colours, and has been washed out. 
Do you know what simply colourless hair is ? — she 
has it. Do you know the eye, that although you 
may be as innocent as the babe unborn, looks upon 
you mournfully, reproachfully, till you begin to have 
an uneasy fancy of the possibility of the metemp- 
sychosis, and wonder whether you ever saw that 
eye before — ^thousands of years since — or did its 
possessor some grievous wrong ? Nadiejda's lips are 
not red — ^the colour seems all kissed out of them. 
Her cheeks are deadly pale, as though she were so 
timid that she had blushed, and blushed till she 
could blush no more, and so turned to Parian 
marble. 

Then we have some ladies who certainly might 
be a little younger than they look (the atrocious 
climate, fatal to every complexion, being considered,) 
but who are decidedly much older than they wish to 
look. Then we have some old ladies (very few — old 
ladies are not plentiful in St. Petersburg ; if you wish 



852 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

to see venerable age you must go into the provinces,) 
and we have a few little girls of the bread-and-butter- 
eating school-girl genus, who sit silent and demure 
in corners, and only speak when they are spoken to : 
which is very seldom indeed. 

I have had occasion, speaking of the " Baba " in 
the pictures of Russian village life, to remark upon 
the general hideousness of the purely Russian peas- 
ant woman. A girl of " sweet sixteen " is a loutish 
wench, a woman of thirty is a horrible harridan. 
The only comely exception is to be found in villages 
partially femini-colonized by Turkish women. In 
the Russo-Turkish campaign of eighteen hundred 
and twenty-nine, very large numbers of Turkish 
ladies became, on a truly Sabine or nolens-volens 
willy-nilly principle, the spouses of Russian soldiers ; 
they were brought to the native villages of their im- 
promptu husbands, and there reared progeny, which, 
in the female line at least, reminds the traveller 
of the agreeable fable of Mahomet's Paradise. It 
is not very conclusive evidence in favour of the in- 
nate fanaticism of the followers of Islam, that these 
Turkish womqn consented with scarcely an excep- 
tion to be baptized, and received into the Greek 
church, and subsequently cheerfully performed all 
the religious duties required by that exigent com- 
munion. 

Grown-up young ladies, with no doughtier cava- 
liers than cadets and imperial pages — beardless, 
albeit brave, in spiked helmets and gold lace — would 
form but an insipid and juvenile-party-sort-of gath- 
ering round the social samovar ; but the fact is, that 



HIGH JINKS AT CHRTSTOFFSKY. 353 

the great majority of the boys in ■uniform have brought 
their big brothers with them, who now, in all the 
glories of their hussar, and cuirassier, and Cossack 
of the Guard uniforms, lounge upon ottomans and 
hang over pianofortes, and peg at the polished floor- 
ing with their spurs, and twirl their moustaches, and 
pervade the salons of the kindest lady in the world 
with a guard-room and mess-room flavour, generally. 
The bond of union between all these dissimilar ele- 
ments — ladies, schoolboys, and dragoons — is the 
gentle Turki-krepi-Tabak, or Turkish tobacco, which, 
rolled into little paper cigarettes (called papiros) by 
the fair hands of. ladies, is being complacently ex- 
haled by nearly every one present. The little school- 
girls, it is true, refrained from the weed ; but the of- 
ficers and cadets, and — I blush to write it — ^the ma- 
jority of the grown-up young ladies — yea even the 
Queen of Sheba — are all pufling away, consistently 
and complacently, at their papiros. As to the old 
ladies, there is no exaggeration in saying they are 
smoking like lime-kilns ; and tobacco-ash is abund- 
ant on the furniture, and the floor, and the keys of 
the pianoforte. I am not great at the papiros my- 
self, ordinarily regarding it as a weak figment — a 
tiny kickshaw or side-dish, unworthy the attention 
of a steady and serious smoker, and am, besides, 
afraid that I shall some day swallow the flimsy roll 
by a too vigorous inhalation. For this reason per- 
haps it is, or maybe because I am naturally modest, 
not to say awkward, clumsy, and born with two left 
hands and two left feet, I do not mingle much with 
the gay throng, but retire within myself and a pow- 



354 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

erful Havana cigar behind the window-curtain. I 
miss nothing, however, either of the conversation or 
of the music ; I have my full and proper allowance 
of tumblers of tea ; nay, the kindest lady in the 
world is good enough, from time to time, to convey 
me almond cakes in the smoky seclusion I have 
chosen for myself. 

We go on chatting, pianoforte-tinkling, French 
romance-telling, smoking, and samovarizing, till past 
one in the morning. There is an apology for illumi- 
nation in the shape of a moderator lamp on a gued- 
iron in one corner ; but nobody minds it : nobody 
has need of it. The night-daylight in the sky is 
quite sufficient for us to smoke and chat — and shall 
I say it ? — make love by. 

It is quite time I think that I should explain to 
you why there should be high jinks at ChristofFsky 
to night (the height of those jinks, is the cause of 
our samovarizing, this twenty-first of June, so late 
or early,) where ChristofFsky itself is, and what the 
jinks I have entitled high are like. 

ChristofFsky is one of the many beautiful islands 
that jewel the bosom of the Neva ; and every 
year, on the Eve of St. John, the whole German 
population of St. Petersburg, rich and poor, men, 
women, and children, emigrate in steamers and gon- 
dolas, and cockboats to ChristofFsky, and there picnic, 
or bivouac, for three days and nights. They snatch 
odd instalments of forty winks during this time, but 
the vast majority of it is devoted to the congenial 
task of " keeping it up," and this they do with a 
vigour of conviviality approaching the ferocious. 



HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY. 855 

To tell the honest truth, the German bivouac at 
ChristofFsky is an unmitigated saturnalia, and my 
pen will require a great amount of reining up and 
toning down while I attempt to describe its Teutonic 
eccentricities. 

The noble Russians, who despise the German na- 
tion and hate the German language, (whose acquire- 
ment to perfect fluency is compulsory to all candi- 
dates for military service, even to Nous Autres,) and 
loathe the Russo-German nobility, condescend on 
this twenty-first of June to cross in gondolas to 
Christoflsky, and there to watch the bacchanalian 
orgies of the Germans, with the same sort of sneer- 
ing contempt that might have moved an educated 
Lacedemonian of the old time at the sight of a 
drunken Helot ; but with the same half-pleased, half- 
scornful interest that flickers on Mephistopheles' vis- 
age when he sees the piggish revelries of the stu- 
dents in Auerbach's cellar. 

We have made up a party (of gentlemen, be it 
understood) to go see the high jinks at Christoflsky ; 
we are about eight for one gondola load; among 
them there are but two civilians : myself — if a mem- 
ber of the press militant can be called a civilian 
— and a distinguished young and closely-shaven 
Tchinovnik, who has a startling resemblance to the 
mind-picture I had formed of what Ignatius Loyola, 
formerly a soldier, and afterwards a Jesuit, was like 
in his youth. This Tchinovnik — I will call him 
Fedor Escobarovitch — though barely twenty-three, 
is high up in the department of foreign affairs ; in 
the secret department, where the archives are, and 



356 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the pretty little notes are concocted, and the fat is 
extracted from the otherwise dry bones of diplo- 
macy, which afterwards falls into the political fire, 
and sets all Europe in a blaze. 

We bid the ladies good night, and setting forth, 
well wrapped up in coats and capotes, you may be 
sure, gain the Troitza-most, or Great Timber Bridge 
of the Trinity. I ought to have mentioned that 
cadets have been rigorously — ^with but one excep- 
tion — excluded from our party, on the motion of an 
exceedingly impertinent cornet of light cavalry, with 
a cherry-coloured cap, a braided surtout — like that 
of M. Perrot in the Varsoviana — a very sunburnt 
face and a very white forehead (he has been down 
to his terres or estates lately.) This young Tartar, 
who has not possessed a commission three months 
yet, says that it will compromise his uniform to be 
seen, publicly, in company with a cadet. To samo- 
varize, or play cards with him — hon ! but to be seen 
with him in a gondola, or at the High Christoffian 
Jinks — that would never do. The exception at last 
in favour of a very mild, inoffensive, blue-eyed pupil 
of the engineer corps is made ; ostensibly 6n the 
ground of the cherry-coloured cornet waiving his 
objections on the score of not wishing to disturb 
the harmony of the evening — which was the morn- 
ing of the next day. Nobody makes any objection 
to me, though I am in plain black, am not a Tchi- 
novnik — nay, not even a cadet in the engineer corps ; 
but I am simply an Angliski who can talk and 
smoke with, and be asked questions by them. So 
we go away gayly in a gondola, (for which we have 



HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY. 357 

to pay an enormous fare,) and in due time land at 
ChristofFsky, I sitting among these jovial young 
nobles, as Gubetta sat among the Orsinis and Ga- 
zellas in the pJay — they little wotting that Donna 
Lucrezia Borgia was waiting for me, in the shape 
of a printing-press at home. They would have 
thrown me out of the boat had they known that, I 
think. 

The high jinks fully answer our expectations : 
they are exceedingly high. The immense expanse 
of green sw^rd is covered with an encampment of 
gipsy-like tents — some white, some black, some red, 
some striped in white and blue. There are other 
tents, or rather wigwams, constructed of branches 
covered in with green leaves, beneath whose verdant 
covering some fat German children in the wood are 
smoking and drinking and snoring. There are 
some more fortunate members of the class the 
Russians so contemptuously designate as " Ganz 
Deutsch," who display a degree of luxury almost 
amounting to ostentation in the temporary edifices 
they have erected to have their orgies and their 
Midsummer madness in. These are quite pavilions, 
the canvas of gay colours, looped and fringed, and 
banners waving firom the apex of the conical roof. 
There are many simple bivouacs, belonging probably 
to artizans too poor to have tents, and who squat 
in a circle — always smoking, drinking, and occa- 
sionally howling, round a tremendous bonfire of 
green wood, which crackles and blazes and fumes 
in approved gipsy fashion. But, in place of the 
time-honoured pot containing the surreptitiously- 



358 A JOUENEY DUB NOETH. 

obtained supper of the Zingari — the stolen fowls, 
the purloined turkeys, the snared pheasants, and the 
ill-gotten rabbits, with other dishonestly-annexed ad- 
denda in the way of vegetables, which go towards 
furnishing forth the hot supper of a British Bohe- 
mian, — instead of the pot, suspended by a triangle 
and a hook over the blaze, we have here in every 
case the samovar : big, brazen, and battered. As 
to its serving for purposes of tea-making at this 
German carousal, I strenuously and determinedly 
disbelieve it. It is punch, sir — hot punch— punch, 
made not of cognac, made not of Jamaica rum or 
Irish whiskey — ^though both are to be obtained (at 
an enormous price) in Russia — made not even from 
the native Vodki ; but, brewed from the hot, potent, 
dark-coloured Brantwein of Deutschland the be- 
loved ; especially imported, or smuggled, through 
the custom-house, which comes in the main to the 
same thing, for the festivities, otherwise high jinks, 
of ChristofFsky. 

To give you a notion of the crowds of persons of 
both sexes, of all ages, and apparently of all condi- 
tions, who are sprawling or tumbling, or leaping or 
dancing about this "green isle," would be difficult, 
if not impossible. To give you a notion of the 
great circles, formed, I thought at first, for -kiss-in-^ 
the-ring, but, I soon discovered, for waltzes and 
quadrilles ; of the debauched Germans lying about 
dead drunk, or rushing about mad drunk ; of hunch- 
backs, with bottles of liquor, capering up to you, 
with strange mouthings and writhings ; of the roar- 
ing choruses, the discordant music, the Punch's 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 359 

shows — Punch's shows in Russia! — the acrobats, 
the dancing dogs and monkeys, the conjurers, the 
gambling tables, the Russian moujiks, not mingling 
among the revellers to revel with them, but to sell 
quass, tea, meat pies, hard eggs, and salted cucum- 
bers ; to see all this made you dizzy, almost drunk. 
And the swings, and the round-abouts, and the 
gray-coated Polizeis^ ever watchful, ever ruthless, 
making savage forays on the revellers, and convey- 
ing them to prison, there to learn that their even- 
ing's amusement would not bear the morning's 
reflection. 

We did not return from ChristofFsky by water, 
but on several droschkies — jthere is a bridge uniting 
the scene of the high jinks to Wassaily Ostrow — 
and for which droschkies, in their severality, we had 
to pay several roubles. Going to bed at about six 
o'clock, very tired and worn out, I fell into a weary 
sleep, and dreamt that I had been to Greenwich 
Fair at night, having been at the Derby all day, and 
having seen the masque of Comus the night before. 
Which is about the best notion I can give of the 
high jinks at Christoffsky. 



xvn. 

THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE). 

Droschkying one day along the Gorokhovaia, or 
Street of the Peas, there passed me, darting in and 



360 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

out of the usual mounted escort of dust, one of the 
neatest turn-outs in the way of a private droschky 
that I had seen since my arrival in St. Petersburg. 
The horse was a magnificent Alezan, worth from 
eight hundred to a thousand roubles probably — an 
arch-necked, small, proud, wicked-headed brute. 
The Ischvostchik was a picture — stalwart, well- 
proportioned, full-bearded, and white-teethed ; his 
caftan well-fitting, his sash resplendent, his neck- 
cloth so snowy in its hue, so irreproachable in its 
uncreasiness, that it might have shone to advantage 
at a Sunday-school revival — nay, might have been 
thought not unworthy to gleam with a sanctified 
shimmer on the platform of Exeter Hall the Great, 
itself. He held his reins delicately, and dallied with 
them digitally, more as though he were playing on 
the harpsichord than guiding a vicious horse. Be- 
hind this grand-ducal-droschky-looking charioteer, 
there sat a stout man with a stouter, flabbier, and 
very pale and unwholesome-looking visage. It was 
the reverse of good to see those pendant cheeks of 
his, gelatinizing over the choking collar of his uni- 
form. Moreover, he wore gold-rimmed spectacles ; 
moreover, his shiny black hair was cropped close to 
his head, much more in a recently- discharged Eng- 
lish ticket-of-leave than in a Russian and military 
fashion ; mostover, he had not a vestige of mous- 
tache about him; and this last circumstance, com- 
bined with a tiny equilateral triangle of turn-down 
collar that asserted itself over each side of his stock 
below where his cheeks were wagging, puzzled me 
mightily, mingling as both together did a dash of 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 36 

the civil with the military element in him. For, s.? 
to the rest of his attire he was all martial — coat 
buttoned up to here, spiked and doubled-eagled 
helmet, gray capote, buckskin gloves, and patent- 
leather boots. Could this be the Czar himself? I 
asked myself. I had heard of the studiously unos- 
tentatious manner in which the autocrat perambu- 
lates the streets of his capital ; but then I know 
also, from the columns of that morning's Journal de 
St. Petersbourg, that the Gossudar was at Revel, 
indulging in the innocent delights of sea-bathing 
with his wife and family. Who could this be — ^the 
governor of St. Petersburg ? Count Nesselrode ? 
Say. 

Let me here remark that the Russians, who are 
the cutest sophists, if not the closest reasoners, to be 
found in a long life's march, frequently allude with 
exulting complacency to the quiet, modest, and on- 
his-people-confiding manner in which the emperor 
goes about. " We have no walking on jealously- 
guarded slopes in Russia," they say ; " our emperor 
takes his morning walk from nine to ten on the 
Quay de la Cour, in front of the Winter Palace, 
where the poorest moujik or gondola boatman can 
salute him. We have no barouches-and-four, no 
glass coaches with cuirassiers riding with cocked 
pistols at the windows, or escorts of Cent Gardes, 
or hussars, or lancers following behind. We have 
not even outriders or equerries — nay, not a single 
fqotman nor groom. The Czar is driven about in a 
one-horse chay, an Ischvostchik to drive him, just as 

you may have one, only a little dirtier, for your five- 

16 



36 -i A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

and-twenty copecks ; and that is all. Our Czar's 
escort is in the people he loves so well ; his greatest 
safeguard is in their unalterable veneration and 
affection for him." Unto such Russians I have 
ordinarily answered, True, O king ! but what needs 
your master with an escort when St. Petersburg is 
one huge barrack, or rather one huge police station ? 
What need of Cent Gardes when there are thou- 
sands of police guards walking within the Czar's 
droschky -sight on the Nevskoi ? What need has a 
keeper to be afraid of a fierce bear, when the beast 
is muzzled, and chained, and shackled to the floor of 
his den, and barred in besides ? 

I had with me on this occasion a companion of 
the Russian ilk, and made bold to ask that Musco- 
vite who this gray-capoted unmoustachioed appari- 
tion in the handsome droschky might be. I must 
explain that I was very young to Russia at this 
time — a month's longer residence would have made 
me wondrously uniform wise ; for being necessarily 
and constantly in contact with persons wearing 
some uniform garb or other, a man must needs grow 
learned in buttons, and facings, and coat-cuts, and 
sword-hilts, and can nose a guardsman or a lines- 
man on the Nevskoi by what is nautically — and per- 
haps naughtily — expressed as the cut of his jib, as 
easily as Polonius was said to be susceptible of nasal 
detection by the Danish gentleman who saw the 
ghost, and used bad language to his mother. 

The Russian to whom I addressed this query 
responded, first by the usual shrug, next by the usual 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE). 363 

smile, and lastly by the inevitable Russian counter- 
query : 

" Do you mean to say you don't know ? " 

" I have not the slightest notion. A field-mar- 
shal ? Prince GortschakofF ? General Todleben ? " 

" My dear fellow, that is a major of police." 

" His pay must be something enormous then, or 
his private fortune must be very handsome," I ven- 
tured to remark ; " he being able to drive so elegant 
an equipage as the one we have just seen." 

" That dog's son," the Russian answered leisurely, 
" has not a penny of his own in the world, and his 
full pay and allowances may amount, at the very 
outside, to about two hundred and fifty roubles a 
year," (forty pounds.) 

" But whence the private droschky, the Alezan 
horse, the silver-mounted harness, the luxury of the 
whole turn-out ? " I asked. 

"iZ prend^'' (he takes,) the Russian answered very 
coolly ; whereupon, as by this time we had arrived 
at the corner of the Great Moorska'ia, he deigned to 
descend from the vehicle, and, leaving me to pay the 
Ischvostchik, he went on his way, and I saw him no 
more till dinner-time. 

Which is so much of the apologue I have to tell 
concerning my first definite notions of the Russian 
police. 

The Russian Boguey, like the police system of 
most despotic countries, is divided into two great 
sections — the judicial or public, and the political or 
secret. As I purpose to teU all I know anent both 
these peculiarly infamous bodies, but as I have made 



864 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

a VOW (among a great many vows, one of a charm- 
ingly Asdrubalicj Hannibalie nature, which has 
revenge for its object) against digression, I will be 
as succinct as I can, and, treating of the judicial 
police first, take you at once to the nearest police- 
station. 

This is called a Siege or Seat, synonymous with 
the police Prsesidium of German towns. The head 
of the judicial or municipal police of St. Petersburg 
(under the great Panjandrum and Archimandrite of 
all the E/Ussian bobbies — the chief of the gendar- 
merie who has that house on the Fontanka) is called 
the Grand Master of Police. He has his acolytes, 
and his offices, and chancellerie, and attributions. 
He is Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne, in fact, 
subject to the beneficent control of a police home 
secretary. Under this Grand Master, the capital is 
divided into districts and arrondissements, each hav- 
ing a central station, bureau, barrack, prison, hos- 
pital, torture-yard, fire-engine house, and watch- 
tower. The amalgamated entity is the Siege. 

Take a Siege and place it in one of the score of 
linies that run in grim parallels across Wassily Os- 
trow.* 

* I have frequently been on the point of giving way to a pleo- 
nasm, and speaking of the island of Wassily Ostrow — Ostrow, 
Ostrov, or Ostroff, meaning itself an island — which would render 
me amenable to as much ridicule, I opine, as that Parisian cafe 
proprietor who advertised in his window that Eau de Soda Water 
was always to be had on the premises. As regards the etymol- 
ogy of Wassily Ostrow it is written that in Peter the Great's 
time it was but a swampy islet in the Neva (it is now nearly en- 
tirely built upon) with but one small fort, which was under the 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 365 

You have a vast stone packing-case — a sepulchre 
of justice carefully whited without. Above the 
door there must be of course the usual lengthy in- 
scription in Russ which is to be found on every pub- 
lic building in Russia, about Heaven, the Czar, and 
the imperial something or other. Every thing is 
imperial Due North. The packing-case, understand, 
is not the whole of the building. It might be said, 
with more justice perhaps, to resemble a very squat, 
unornamented copy of the New Houses of Parlia- 
ment ; for, from one corner rises the Victoria Tower 
of the Siege, in the shape of that celebrated watch- 
tower you have already heard about — ^in the Nev- 
skoi', close to the Gostinnoi-dvor and the town-hall, 
as also at Volnoi-Volostchok. The watchtower 
may, and frequently does rise to the height of one 
hundred feet ; this one appertaining to a police Siege 
that has been but recently erected, is of solid stone. 
Wooden buildings of every description are common 
throughout Russia ; but, it is an inflexible and 
laudable principle with the government never to 
allow any building of wood in a town once de- 
government of one Basil, pronounced by the Russians Vacil. 
When Peter, from his wooden house in the Island of Petersburg, 
had occasion to send despatches to his isolated lieutenant, he was 
accustomed to address his letters thus : — " Vacil na Ostrow " — 
To Yacil at the island. Contraction and ellipsis soon take place ; 
and no man wots of Governor Basil now. Wassily Ostrow is 
full of houses : the Byrsa or Exchange, the Custom-house, the 
School of Mines, the Academies of Arts and Sciences, the Great 
Cadet School — all these magnificent edifices are there ; and the 
swampy islet, the wooden fort, and Peter Velike's lieutenant are 
forgotten. 



366 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

stroyed to be built up again of the same combustible 
material. Stone or brick must be the only wear, or 
the house itself never rise again from its foundations. 
Within the balcony on the summit of the tower, and 
round about the iron apparatus of rods and uprights 
on which the different coloured balls and flags de- 
noting the phases of a fire are displayed [a yellow 
flag flies during the whole time a conflagration is 
actually raging], walk round around, in moody con- 
templation of the vast marble panorama spread out 
at their feet, two gray-coated sentinels, searching 
with impassible gaze into the secrets of the city, and 
signalling with equal indifference a fire at the mon- 
strously magnificent Winter Palace, or a fire at the 
log-built cabin of some miserable lighterman who 
dwells in the slums of Petersburg far down among 
the ooze below the arsenal and the tallow warehouse. 
What matters it to them or to the master they are 
compelled to serve — the Sultan Kebir — the Czar of 
Fire ? For, is not fire like Death, and does it not 

.... sequo pulsat pede 
Pauperum tabernas, regumque turres ? 

At the base of the watchtower there stretches 
out, in a line with the packing-case, a long stone 
wall, with a door painted bright green in the centre ; 
when that door is open you may, peeping through* 
it, descry the yard of the fire-engine establishment, 
and see, ranged under sheds, the fire-engines and 
water-carts. The former are clumsy-looking ma- 
chines enough; the latter are simply barrels upon 
wheels, like the old Parisian water-carrier's carts ; 



THE GEEAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 367 

but, all are painted bright green picked out with 
scarlet. I am not digressing in speaking of the 
Petersburgian fire-brigade while my topic is the 
Petersburgian police, for the fire-engines and the 
men who serve them are under the immediate con- 
trol of Boguey. The Russian fire-engineers do not 
appear to take that pride and pleasure in the smart, 
trim, dandified appearance of their engines, hose, 
buckets, fittings, and general plant, which so emi- 
nently distinguish the bold Braidwood brigadiers of 
London, and the grisette-adored, brass-helmeted 
sapeur-pompiers of Paris. They seem dull, listless, 
ponderous fellows — afilicted with the general police 
malady, in fact — and look upon the engines as 
though they had taken them in charge, and were 
afraid of their running away. You would imagine 
that in Russia, where the equine race is remarkable 
for strength, swiftness, and endurance, the fire-engine 
horses would be the very best in the world. It is 
not so. By a strange perversity of martinet desire 
to keep up appearances, the authorities instead of 
harnessing to a fire-engine a team of fighting, kick- 
ing droschky horses, unapproachable for tearing over 
the stones and stopping at nothing, provide huge, 
showy, clumsy brutes, whose breed appears to hover 
between that of an overfed mourning-coach horse, 
and a Suffolk Punch grown out of all stable knowl- 
edge. The Russians brag — as they do, indeed, 
about most things — of the tremendous pace these 
horses are up to ; but I have seen them out, over 
and over again, when the cry of " Agon ! " (fire) has 
arisen, and there has been a conflagration some- 



368 A JOUENEY DUE NORTH. 

where. Where wheels and hoofs have assuredly the 
best chance, on the smooth wooden pavement of the 
Nevskoi, they go at a tolerable rate ; but elsewhere 
their performances are, in my humble opinion, con- 
temptible. Much clattering, much flint and steel 
pyrotechnics between horseshoes and pavement, 
much smacking of serpentine whips, much rattling 
of wheels, much yelling from mounted police-sol- 
diers to moujiks and Ischvostchiks to get out of 
the way, much knocking down of those unhappy 
souls if they are tardy in doing so : but, of real 
speed — of that lightning flashing of locomotion 
which we, in London, are dazed with when the 
scarlet fire-annihilator with its brave band of life- 
savers is seen for a moment in the eye's field — there 
is positively none. The Russian firemen are very 
brave ; that is, they will stand on a roof till it tum- 
bles into the flames, calmly holding the hose in their 
hands, unless they are ordered to come down ; that 
is, they will walk gravely up a blazing staircase, at 
the word of command, into a blazing drawing-room 
to seek for a bird-cage or a lady's fan. They are 
especially great in standing to be burnt, because 
they have been posted at certain spots ; and scarcely 
a fire occurs in St. Petersburg without one or more 
lives being sacrificed through this stolid, stupid, 
inert bravery of the firemen. 

Loitering listlessly on the threshold of the grim 
Police Siege, (and a man may do worse than loiter 
and look before he leaps into the Cave of Trbpho- 
nius,) I fell into a strange reverie, gazing up at 
those two impassible gray-coated sentinels in the 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE). 369 

watchtower's balcony. I am no longer Due North 
in Russia : I am North, among the mountains of 
Cumberland, and somebody has sent me a letter. 
It is full of news about Jones, Brown, and Robinson, 
at a place I love. It tells me how Miss Myrtle, who 
has been going to be married so long, is married at 
last; how Tom Daffy has taken orders, and Jack 
Edwards has taken to drinking ; how my old School- 
master has gone to Australia, and my old sweetheart 
has gone dead. But, there is a remarkable para- 
graph that interests me, above all things, and, I know 
not why, fills me with a strange feeling of envy. I 
have asked for news of two friends, and I am told 
they are leading bachelor lives, enjoying themselves 
upon hot roast goose and whiskey punch ! Heavens ! 
what a life ! Is it not the summum bonum of hu- 
man felicity ? What could a man desire more ? To 
live on hot roast goose — hot, mind ! — with whiskey 
punch (hot also, I will be bound) d discretion. Ma- 
homet's paradise, Gulchenrouz's abode that we read 
of in Vathek, the Elysian Fields, Fiddler's Green, 
all the 'baccy in the world and more 'baccy, an opi- 
um eater's most transcendant trance — none of these 
states of beatitude surely could compare with the 
goose and the punch condition of happiness. And, 
with this silly theorem still running in my mind, I 
find myself still gazing, gazing moonwards, and to 
where the sentinels are watching, and still find my- 
self repeating, What a life ! what a life ! till a 
vagrant shaft of thought from the hot goose and 
punch quiver, flies straight to one of those gray- 
coated targets of watchers, and hits him in the bull's- 
16* 



370 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

eye or the button-hole ; and, still repeating What a 
life ! I run off at a tangent of reverie when I think 
what a life Ms must be ! 

If they were to put a musket and bayonet into 
your hands, and bid you walk up and down before 
a door for two hours ; if they were to clap me a-top 
of the Monument, and bid me look out, and note if 
between Shooter's Hill and Hampstead Heath there 
happened to be a house on fire; would not you and 
I go mad ? I am sure I should. Suppose yonder 
gray-coat, or this slow-pacing grenadier to be a man 
god-gifted with imagination, with impulses ; suppose 
him to have any human passion or scintillation of 
human thought in him ; and reconcile this, if you 
can, with his watching or keeping guard, without 
casting himself from the tower, without attempting 
to swallow the contents of his cartouche-box, or 
balancing his musket and bayonet on the tip of his 
nose, or howKng forth comic songs, or essaying the 
Frog hornpipe ! You will say that it is habit, that 
is that use which is our second nature that makes 
him go through this weary pilgrimage quietly and 
uncomplainingly. Are there not lighthouse guardi- 
ans, omnibus time-keepers, men who watch furnace 
fires ? It may be so : we are as glib, I opine, in 
talking of habit in men, as we are in talking of in- 
stinct in animals ; but, I say again, What a life ! 
what a life ! And suddenly remembering that I 
promised, in the outset of this paper, not to di- 
gress, nay vowed — rashly, I am afraid, like Jeph- 
tha — and have already broken my vow, I hurry 
away from the octagonal watchtower, its silent 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 871 

watchers remaining as mysterious to me as the 
Sphinx. 

Two more gray-coated men, but with helmets 
(the watchers on the tower wear flat caps like exag- 
gerated muffins,) who are cracking nuts lazily at the 
ever-yawning doorway of the Siege, point out the 
entrance to that abode of misery. Straight from 
the door, and perforating the centre of the stone 
packing-case, there runs a vaulted corridor of stone 
and of immense length, ending at last in a back- 
yard with very high walls, of which I shall have to 
tell presently. 

Opens into this corridor, a bureau or counting- 
house, or writing-room — call it by what name you 
will. From a great deal table with inkstands resting 
in holes cut in the wood, and from a multitude of 
clerks scribbling furiously thereat, you might imag- 
ine yourself in the reporters' room of the office of a 
daily newspaper in the old days, before the comfort- 
able cushioned-seated writing-rooms were attached 
to the reporters' gallery of the Houses of Parliament ; 
you might imagine these scribblers to be gentlemen 
of the press, transferring their short-hand notes of a 
day's sitting in the Commons into long hand. But 
they are not: these are Tchinovniks — police and 
government employes — of the very lowest grade, for 
no person of noble birth would, under any circum- 
stances, consent to serve in the police. The lowest 
grade in the Tchinn confers nobility per se ; but, 
that nobility is not transmissible ; and though a 
police-office clerk belongs to the eighteenth grade, 
and has the right to the title of Your Honour, his 



872 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

son after him is no more than a free moujik, and is 
subject to the stick as well as Ivan the moujik and 
slave. The employes of the police are mostly re- 
cruited from that mysterious and impalpable body 
who in Russia do duty as a bourgeosie or middle- 
class, but do not at all answer to our ideas of what 
a middle-class should be, and utterly fail, as Curtii, 
in filling up that yawning gulf that separates the 
Russian noble from the Russian serf. They are 
sons of military cantonists, who have shown some 
aptitude ; they are orphans adopted by the govern- 
ment, and educated in one of the government 
schools ; they are priests' sons, who have declined, 
contrary to the almost invariable rule, to embrace 
their fathers' profession ; they are waifs and strays 
of foreigners naturalized in Russia, of Germans 
trade-fallen, (many of the higher police employes are 
Prussians,) of Fins under a cloud, of recreant Poles, 
of progeny of byegone Turkish and French prison- 
ers of war. An abominably bad lot they are. See 
them in their shabby uniforms, with their pale, de- 
graded faces, and their hideous blue cotton pocket- 
handkerchiefs with white spots : mark their reeking 
odour of stale tobacco-smoke, onions, cucumbers, 
and vodki : watch them scrawling over their detesta- 
ble printed forms — forms printed on paper that Mr. 
Catnach of Seven Dials, London, would be ashamed 
to send forth a last dying speech upon — but all duly 
stamped with the Imperial stamp, and branded with 
that Imperial bat, which is nailed on every Imperial 
barn-door in Russia, the double eagle. Let all this 
pass. They may not be able to help their shabbi- 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE). 373 

ness, their evil odour, or their evil looks ; but, their 
evil doings are open and manifest, and infamous. 
A police-office employS is known to be — ^with the 
single exception of an employe in the custom-house 
at Cronstadt, who may be said to whop all creation 
for villany — ^the most dishonest, rapacious, avaricious, 
impudent, and mendacious specimen to be found of 
the Tchinovnik. And that is saying a great deal. 

Lead from this bureau, but not from the corridor, 
sundry chambers and cabinets, where, at smaller 
tables covered with shabby green baize, sit chiefs 
of departments of the great Boguey line of busi- 
ness ; but, all filling up the same forms, spilling the 
same ink, nibbing or splitting up the same pens, 
raining the same Sahara showers of pounce, and 
signing the same documents with elaborate signa- 
tures in which there is but a halfpenny-worth of 
name to an intolerable quantity of paraphe or flour- 
ishing. Heaven and Boguey himself only know 
what all these forms are about ; why, if it be true, 
as the Russians boast, that there is less criminal- 
ity in St. Petersburg than in any other capital in 
Europe, there should be two score clerks continually 
scribbling in the office of one police-station. It is 
true that the Russian police have a finger in every 
pie ; that they meddle not only with criminals, not 
only with passports, but with hotels, boarding and 
lodging houses, theatres, houses not to be mentioned 
except as houses, balls, soirees, shops, boats, births, 
deaths, and marriages. The police take a Russian 
from his cradle, and never lose sight of him till he is 
snugly deposited in a parti-coloured coffin in the 



3T4 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

great cemetery of Wassily Ostrow. Surely, to be 
an orphan must be a less terrible bereavement in 
Russia than in any other country ; for the police are 
father and mother to everybody, — uncles, aunts, and 
cousins, too ! 

The major of police is a mighty man, and dwells 
in a handsomely-furnished cabinet of his own, — ^lofty 
and spacious, and opening also from the vaulted cor- 
ridor. Here he sits and examines reports, and, not 
filling up those eternal forms, deigns to tick off his 
approval of their contents, and to affix his initials to 
them. Here he sits and interrogates criminals who 
are brought before him chained. Here he decides 
on the number of blows with stick, or rod, or whip, 
to be administered to Ischvostchiks who have been 
drunk over night, or to cooks who have been sent to 
the police-station to be flogged for burning the soup, 
or serving the broccoli with the wrong sauce. Here 
he sits, and here he Takes. 

Taking, on the part of the police, is done in this 
wise. As the recommendation and even license of 
the police is necessary to every one, foreigner or 
native, who wishes to establish an hotel, an eating- 
house, a cafe, or a dram-shop, in St. Petersburg, it 
is very easily to be understood that the expectant 
Boniface hastens to square the police by bribing 
them. It is not at all incomprehensible either, that 
the proprietors of houses — public or private — which 
are the resort of loose or disorderly characters, — of 
houses where thieves are notoriously harboured, or 
where dissipation is rampant, should exhibit a 
laudable celerity in keeping up the most friendly 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 375 

financial relations with the police. And they must 
not only bribe the major, but they must bribe ^the 
employes^ and even the gray-coated police-soldiers. 
It is a continual and refreshing rain, of gray fifty- 
rouble notes to the major, and of blue and green 
fives and threes to the employes, and of twenty-five 
copeck pieces to the gray-coats. Then the major 
has his immediate subordinates^ his polizei-capitan, 
his lieutenants, his secretaries, his orderlies, who 
must all be feed — and feed frequently ; woe-betide 
the hotel, grog-shop or lodging-housekeeper who for- 
gets that the police are of their nature hungry, and 
that the stomachs of their purses must be filled ! 
Any stick is good enough, they say, (though I don't 
believe it,) to beat a dog with ; but, it is certain that 
any accusation trumped up against a financially 
recalcitrant licensed victualler in St. Peterburg, is 
sufficient to stir the official wrath of the grand- 
master of police, who will, unless feed to a tremen- 
dous extent himself, shut up that unbribing man*s 
house incontinent. 

This is why I have called the Russian police 
Boguey. I am not speaking of it now, under its 
aspects of espionage, and slander, and midnight 
outrage. I am speaking of it, simply as a body 
organized to protect the interests of citizens, to 
watch over public order and morals, to pursue and 
detect, and take charge of criminals. It does not 
do this. It simply harasses, frightens, cheats, and 
plunders honest folks. It is as terrible to the igno- 
rant as the Cock Lane Ghost, and is as shameful 
an imposture. 



376 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

In the course of one month's residence in St. 
Petersburg— from May to June — I was robbed four 
times ; of a 'digar-case, of a porte-monnaie, — luckily 
with no gold and very little silver in it, — of an over- 
coat, which was coolly and calmly stolen — goodness 
knows by whom — from the vestibule of a house 
where I went to pay a visit ; and lastly, of an entire 
drawerful of articles, — shirts, neckerchiefs, papers, 
(not notes on things Russian, — I always took care 
of those about me,) cigars, and an opera glass. The 
drawer I had left securely locked on leaving home 
in the morning. On returning, I found it broken 
open, and the contents rifled as I have described. 
Of course, nobody knew any thing about it ; of 
course, the servants were ready to take their Rus- 
sian affidavits that no one had entered my apart- 
ment during my absence, — ^by the door at least ; 
some one might, they delicately hinted, have come 
in by the window : and, indeed, I found that my 
casement had been ingeniously left wide open, with 
a view of favouring the out-door theory. I was in- 
clined, however, most shrewdly to suspect a certain 
stunted chambermaid, with a yellow handkerchief 
tied round her head, and an evil eye, which eye I 
had frequently detected casting covetous glances at 
the drawer where my effects lay perdu. I was in a 
great rage. It is true I had lost no jewellery. My 
diamond solitaire was in safe keeping ; and my gold 
repeater (by Webster) was in England, four pounds 
ten slow. But I was exasperated on account of the 
loss of my papers, (might there not have been a son- 
net addressed to Her with a large H among them !) 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGXJEY (THE POLICE.) 377 

and on the first flush of this exasperation I deter- 
mined to lay before the police authorities, at least a 
declaration of the robbery of which I l^ad been the 
victim. In the nick of time there came and arrested 
me in my mad career a certain sage. He was not a 
Russian, — being, in truth, of the French nation, and 
a commercial traveller for a Champagne house at 
Rheims ; but he had travelled backwards and for- 
wards in Russia for years, and had spied out the 
nakedness of that land thoroughly from Riazan to 
Revel. He was a high-dried coffee -coloured man, 
who wore a wig and a black satin stock, and carried 
a golden snuff-box with a portrait of Charles the 
Tenth on the lid. Said this sage to me : 

*' At how much does Monsieur estimate his loss ? " 

" Well," I replied, " at a rough guess, one might 
say thirty roubles." 

" Then," resumed the sage, " unless Monsieur 
wishes to spend, in addition to his already disbursed 
thirty, another fifty roubles, but very probably more, 
and over and above, to be very nearly tracasse to 
death, I should advise Monsieur to put up quietly 
with his loss, and to say nothing about it, — especially 
to Messieurs de la Police." 

The oracle thus delivered with much Delphic 
solemnity, made me much more inquisitive to know 
why in this strange land a man should not only be 
robbed, but made to pay besides, for having been 
plundered. In the pursuit of knowledge, it appears 
to me, if I remember the circumstance with correct- 
ness, that the sage and I adjourned to the refresh- 
ment buffet of the Hotel Heyde, and that there, after 



378 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the consumption of several malinka riunkas, or petit 
verres of cura^oa, and the incineration of sundry 
papiros or cigarettes, I became strangely enlightened 
as to what an expensive luxury being robbed is in 
Russia. 

If ever you journey for your sins, my dear friend, 
Due North, and happen to have any thing stolen 
from you, — be that any thing your watch, your fur 
pelisse, or your pocket-book full of bank-notes, — 
never apply to the police. Grin and bear it. Put up 
with the loss. Keep it dark. Buy new articles to re- 
place the old ones you have lost ; but, never complain. 
Complaints will lead to your being replundered four- 
fold. They wUl end in your being hunted like a fox, 
and torn up at last piecemeal by the great fox-hunter 
Boguey and his hounds. 

I will put a case : I have a handsome gold watch 
(which I haven't), and I am in St. Peterburg (where 
I am not). I go for an evening's amusement to the 
Eaux Minerales, where the chalybeate springs are 
the pretext, and Herr Isler's gardens, with their mili- 
tary bands and fireworks and suspicious company, 
the real attraction. My watch is quietly subtracted 
from my fob by some dexterous pickpocket in the 
gardens; and I deserve no sympathy for my mishap, 
for Isler's is famous for its fllous. The next day I 
go like a fool, and according to my folly, and lodge 
my complaint at the police Siege of my arrondisse- 
ment. I have the number of my watch. I give the 
maker's name. I describe it minutely, and narrate 
accurately the circumstances under which it was 
taken from me. I do not see the major of police, 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 879 

but one of his aids. The aid tells me in German 
(the judicial police, as a rule, do not speak French ; 
the secret police speak every language under the 
sun, — Chinese, I am sure, included) that justice is 
on the alert, that the thief will certainly be caught 
and brought to condign punishment, and that of the 
ultimate recovery of my watch there cannot be any 
reasonable doubt. Clerks have got through a pro- 
digious quantity of manuscript all about me and my 
watch, by this time ; and a number of the everlast- 
ing forms are pushed towards me to sign. I have 
been told beforehand what I must do, and that there 
is no help for it, so I slip a red note for ten roubles, 
en sandwich, between two of the forms, and hand 
the triplet to the aid, who with a greasy smile bids 
me good morning. 

Henceforth I belong no more to myself, but to 
Boguey. I am hunted up in the morning while I 
am shaving, and at night as I am retiring to rest. 
I am peremptorily summoned to the police office 
five minutes before dinner, and five minutes before 
I have concluded that repast. With infernal inge- 
nuity Boguey fixes on the exact hours when I have 
a social engagement abroad, to summon me to his 
cave of Trophonius, and submit me to vexatious 
interrogatories. Boguey catches sham thieves for 
me — worsted stocking knaves with hearts in their 
bellies no bigger than pins' heads — mere toasts and 
butter, who would as lieve steal the Czar's crown as 
a gold watch, and whose boldest feat of larceny 
would probably be the purloining of a pickled cu- 
cumber from a stall. I am confronted with these 



380 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

scurvy companions, and asked whether I can iden- 
tify them. Boguey's outlying myrmidons bring 
me vile pinchbeck saucepan lids, infamous tinpot 
sconces, which they call watches ; and would much 
like to know if I can recognize them as my prop- 
erty. All this time I am paying rouble after rouble 
for perquisitions, and inquiries, and gratifications, 
and messengers' expenses, and stamps, and an infin- 
ity of other engines of extortion. At last (under 
advice) I rush to the major of police, and ask him 
plainly (but privately,) for how much he will let me 
off. He smiles and refers me to his aid, saying that 
justice cannot have her course impeded. I go to 
the aid, and he smiles too, and tells me that he does 
not think the disbursement of twenty roubles will 
do my Excellency any harm ; and that if I choose 
to place that sum in his hand to be administered in 
charity, he thinks he can guarantee my not being 
again troubled about the robbery. So, I give him 
the money, (which I don't,) and, thank Heaven, I 
I am rid of Boguey, as Andrew Miller thanked 
Heaven he was rid of Doctor Johnson. 

Now do you understand why every sensible man 
in Russia, who is unfortunate enough to be robbed, 
leaves Boguey alone ? 

It would be easy to multiply instances illustrative 
of the taking propensities of the Russian police, 
among whom, in St. Petersburg and Moscow — as 
well as in other government towns of the empire — 
there is really not one pin to choose. Bogueyism is 
synonymous with police management throughout 
all the Russias. I shall confine myself to one or 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 881 

two salient traits of character to be found in those 
terrifiers of well-doers who ought to terrify evil- 
doers, but who are the worthy successors, and have 
in Muscovy continued the glorious traditions of that 
most illustrious of all takers — Jonathan Wild the 
Great. 

The Sire de Brantome generally commences his 
chivalrous tittle-tattle with the exordium : Une 
grande dame^ forte honeste, que fay Men cognu (a 
great lady, and a mighty honest one, whom I know 
extremely well;) and I find myself as constantly 
giving an anecdote on the authority of some Rus- 
sian acquaintance far nobler than honest. In this 
present instance, however, my informant was a 
French hairdresser and perfumer, who had settled 
at Moscow, with the stern and inflexible determina- 
tion to stay there five years, acquire a fortune of 
fifty thousand francs, and then quitting that beastly 
hole, (by which abusive epithet he qualified the holy 
empire of Russia,) to return to Arcissur- Aube ; 
which much whitewashed French town was his 
native place, and there to planter ses choux^ — or cab- 
bages, — defeat the cure of St. Symphorien at his 
favourite game of tric-trac ; become, in course of 
time, mayor of some adjacent village, and eventually, 
perhaps, reassume his ancestral title of Monsieur de 
la Bandoline (now lying perdu, like the Spanish 
Hidalgo's rapier, under the modest nom de circon- 
stance of Hyacinthe, coiffeur et peruquier de Paris,) 
and become sub-prefect of his department. 

A friend of M. Hyacinthe's — say M. M^lasse — 
likewise a sprightly Gaul, kept a magazine for the 



382 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

sale of those articles called by the Americans no- 
tions, in the Tverskaia Oulitza, or great street of 
Tver, in Moscow. But here I must digress with a 
word or two on shops : it is only in old world cities, 
where the civilization is old — very old — ^that you 
find actual shops — special establishments for the 
sale of special articles. As in the rude and remote 
country village, you have Jerry Nutt's Everything 
Shop, where you can procure almost every article — 
from a birch broom to a Byron-tie, from a stick of 
barley-sugar to a lady's chemisette ; so, in newly- 
settled or newly-civilized lands you have not shops 
but Stores, where edibles are mixed up with pot- 
ables, and textile fabrics with both, and books with 
beeswax, and carpeting with -candles. Our Amer- 
ican cousins have repudiated the Everything ele- 
ment, aijd have Shops that can vie with, if they do 
not surpass the counter-jumping palaces of Regent 
Street, London, and the Rue de la Paix, Paris. Yet 
they still retain the name of a Store, for an estab- 
lishment, say a shawl-shop, more magnificent than 
Swan and Edgar's, corruscating with glass and gild- 
ing, and mural paintings, and variegated marbles ; 
and the Russians, for all the bigness of their cities, 
have not yet, as a rule, progressed beyond stores — 
in their streets. In the bazaars there are, certainly, 
special standings for special articles ; but, these are 
more properly stalls than shops. In the two great 
shops of St. Petersburg — ^the Angliski Magazin, in 
the little Millionne, and the Ruski Magazin, on the 
Nevskoi — the incongruous nature of the articles sold 
is astonishing, and, in the smaller shops, there is a 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE). 383 

distracting confusion in the classification of the arti- 
cles purchased. The hairdressers sell almost every- 
thing. You have to go to the grocers for picture- 
frames. The tobacconists sell tea ; the glove-makers 
sell porte-monnaies. The best cigars to be had in 
Petersburg are purchased at an apotheka or drug- 
gist's shop, in the little Morskaia, (the druggists sell 
camera-obscuras, too.) You may buy French 
painted fans of the confectioners, and there is 
scarcely a fashionable modiste who does not sell 
flesh and blood. Altogether, our respected friend 
Mother Hubbard would have enormous trouble in 
Russia in attempting to purvey for that insatiable 
dog of hers, who (like a minister's mother-in-law) 
was always wanting something. She would have 
had to go to the bishop's to buy him ale, or to the 
Winter Palace to buy him a bone. 

M. Melasse sold groceries and a little millinery, 
and a considerable quantity of coloured prints, and 
some Bordeaux, and much Champagne. But, M. 
Melasse happened, though doing a good business, 
to have a temper of his own. Why should M. M^- 
lasse's temper interfere with the success of M. Md- 
lasse's business ? So far, that the black dog which 
occasionally sat on the worthy burgess's shoulder, 
could not abide that other and Blacker T>og^ Boguey, 
the Police of Moscow, and barked at him contin- 
ually. Ches ChienSy (these dogs,) the impudent Me- 
lasse called the guardians of public order. One after- 
noon two gentlemen in gray called on M. Melasse, 
(he spoke R,uss tolerably, which in a Frenchman is 
something marvellous,) and saluting him cordially, 



884 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

produced from a remarkably dirty envelope of sack- 
ing two fine sugar-loaves— the" apex of one of them 
considerably damaged. These, they told him, had 
been found in the open street opposite his house on 
the previous night ; were evidently the produce of a 
robbery committed on his premises ; and were now 
brought to him, not to be restored, but to be identi- 
fied, in order that justice might inform itself, and 
perquisitions be made respecting the thief. Now, 
the seller of notions happened to be entirely out of 
sugar in loaves, had broken up his last a fortnight 
before, was rapidly exhausting his stock of lump 
sugar, and was anxiously expecting a fresh consign- 
ment. He therefore energetically protested that the 
robbery could not have taken place in his house ; 
because, imprimis he had securely fastened doors 
and windows, and kept a fierce watchdog ; secondly, 
because he had no sugar-loaves to be robbed of. 
The men in gray smiled grimly, and showed the 
astonished ^grocer his own private trademark on both 
the loaves. He could not even surmise them to be 
forged ; they were evidently his. The men in gray 
therefore proceeded to commence their perquisitions, 
which they effected by ransacking the house and 
shop from garret to basement — spoiling every article 
of merchandise they could conveniently spoil — 
avowedly for the purpose of seeking traces of the 
burglarious entrance of the thieves. Ultimately they 
left a man in possession, to watch, in case the rob- 
bers renewed their nefarious attempt. This assist- 
ant Boguey turned out to be a gray-coated skeleton 
in every closet in the house. He smoked the vilest 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BO GUEY (THE POLICE). 385 

Mahorka ; he drank vodki like a vampire ; his tak- 
ing snufF was as the sound of a trumpet ; he de- 
manded victuals like a roaring lion ; he devoured 
them like a ghoule ; he awoke the family in the dead 
of night with false alarms of fire and thieves ; he 
drove M. M^lasse to frenzy, Madame M. to passion- 
ate indignation ; Mademoiselle M. to tears and hys- 
terics ; the younger M.'s nearly into fits of terror ; 
and he stayed a fortnight. The thieves didn't come, 
and he didn't go. In the mean time the wretched 
grocer lived the life of a hunted cur. The poKce 
put the sugar-loaves (metaphorically) into a tin ket- 
tle, and attaching them to his dorsal vertebrae, hunted 
him perpetually. The same process of summoning, 
resummoning, interrogating, and cross-interrogating, 
which I have already described in my own (suppo- 
sitious) case, was gone through with him. The 
police found out that he was in the habit of going 
daily on 'change, (for the good man speculated a 
little in Volga Steamboat and Russ- American Iron- 
work shares.) Of course he had to attend the police 
office daily, for a week, exactly at 'change time, and 
was released by his tormentors exactly as the Ex- 
change gates closed. The police captured two poor 
devils of moujiks, who, setting aside the fact that 
they had been previously convicted of robbery, were 
as honest men as the Governor of Moscow, and had 
no more to do with the robbery (which had never 
been committed) than I had. These unfortunate 
rogues they kept chained for some time, and living 
on bread and water in an infamous den at the Police 
Si^ge, averring that there was the strongest pre- 

17 



386 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

sumption of their guilt. They suddenly discovered 
that they were as free from blame as the driven 
snow ; setting them at liberty, they sent in a peremp- 
tory demand to M. Melasse for a corpulent sum of 
roubles, to defray the expenses of their board and 
lodging during their imprisonment, and to compen- 
sate them for the injury they had suffered. He at 
first refused to pay, but ultimately disbursed the 
sum demanded, in despair. He was beginning to 
entertain the notion of a plunge, for good and all, 
into the Moskva River, when he received a commu- 
nication from the mayor of police, informing him in 
the most polite terms that it had been considered 
expedient to refer his case, which was considered to 
be a very intricate one, to the Ouprava Blagotschi- 
nia, or Bureau de Bon Ordre, presided over by the 
Grand Master of Police in St. Petersburg, and beg- 
ging him to take the necessary steps to 'present a 
petition to the Governor- General of Moscow, in 
order that he might procure a passport, and proceed 
to head police quarters at St. Petersburg, there to 
be interrogated concerning the most remarkable 
robbery that had for a long time baffled the sagacity 
of justice; — ^the more remarkable, I may myself 
remark, for its never having taken place. Melasse, 
the unhappy, rushed on the wings of the wind, and 
the polished runners of a sledge (it was in winter) 
to the police office. He thrust five roubles into the 
first gray-coat's hand he met, and promised him ten, 
if he would procure him immediate speech with the 
Mayor of Police. Ushered into the presence of that 
functionary he conjured him, without halting for 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHE POLICE). 387 

breath, to tell him how much, in the name of Heaven, 
he would take to release him from this intolerable 
persecution. The polizei-mayor laughed, poked him 
in the ribs, and offered him to snuff. 

" I am glad to see you returning to better senti- 
ments, my dear M. M^lasse," he said quite cordially. 
"What is the good of fighting against us ? Why 
omit doing what must be done ? You are in Russia, 
you must be content to have things managed a la 
Russe. When you live with wolves you must needs 
howl, M. Melasse." 

" How much ? " the victim palpitated. 

" There, there, brat," (brother,) continued the warm- 
hearted police-mayor. " You shall be absolved easily. 
.1 think if you were to place a hundred and fifty 
silver roubles in that blotting-book, I should know 
how to relieve many destitute families. We see so 
MUCH misery, my dear friend," he added with a 
sigh. 

M. Melasse set his teeth very closely together; 
drew the hundred and fifty silver roubles in paper- 
money from his pocket-book, shut his eyes, that he 
might not see his substance departing from him, and 
crammed the money into the blotting-book. 

" And I tell you what, uncle of mine," the mayor 
resumed, jauntily fluttering the blotting-book leaves, 
and twirling (quite accidentally, of course) the greasy 
little packet of wealth into his ravenous palm, " you 
shall not say that the Russian police never return 
any of the goods they have recovered; for, this very 
afternoon, I will send down two of my men, and 

YOU SHALL HAVE YOUR SUGAR-LOAVES BACK AGAIN." 



388 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

With a suppressed shriek, the emancipated-loaf 
captive entreated the mayor never to let him hear or 
see more of that accursed sweet-stuff. The mayor 
was a placable man, and open to suasion. He prom- 
ised to allow the sugar-question to drop forever; 
and dignifying the unroubled grocer with the affec- 
tionate cognomen of Batiouschka — little father — 
bade him an airy good morning, and retired into his 
sanctum sanctorum : there, doubtless to lock up his 
honestly-earned roubles in his cassette, and, perhaps, 
to laugh somewhat in that official sleeve of his, at 
the rare sport of swindling a Fransoutz. The moral 
of the story is, that Melasse did not quit Moscow at 
once, and in disgust. He stopped, for he also was 
possessed of that fixed idea common to most for- 
eign traders in Russia, of acquiring a given number 
of thousand silver roubles, and retiring, in the end, 
to an Arcissur-Aube of his own, where he could 
enjoy his otium cum dignitatem and abuse the land 
where he had made his money. He stopped ; and 
there was great joy among the police-population of 
Moscow the holy, that there was no Inostranez, or 
stranger, in Moscow who kept on better terms with 
Boguey, or was prompter and more liberal in his 
felicitations (silver rouble felicitations) on New Year's 
Day than M. Mdlasse of the Tvershala. 

Now, New Year's Day is the Russian (as it is the 
French) Boxing Day. Apart from the genteel ca- 
deaux of bon-bons, gloves, and jewellery, which you 
are expected (under pain of banishment from soirees 
and ostracism from morning calls) to make to gen- 
teel acquaintances, you have your servants to tip ; 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOOUEY (THE POLICE). 389 

your dvnornik to tip ; and, especially, your police to 
tip. If you are fortunate enough to be a private 
individual, you get oif with a visit from the Nadzira- 
telle of the Quartal, or quartier (a sub-division of 
the arrondissement), who, with many bows, offers 
you his felicitations, and to whom you give ten 
roubles. But, if you are a nobleman or an hotel- 
keeper, your lot is far harder. By a compliment of 
fifty (many give a hundred) roubles you may pur- 
chase impunity during the ensuing year for almost 
every act or deed, legal or illegal, over which the 
police exercise any amount of control. The hotel- 
keepers give and tremble ; the nobles give and de- 
spise. That same newly-fledged cornet I told you 
of, who had the big house to himself, assured me 
that he never allowed an officer of the judicial police 
to cross the threshold of his apartment. The secret 
police come in without being asked, and leave their 
marks behind them. " When New Year's Day 
arrives," my young Mend would say, " and the pigs 
come with their salutations, I send them out the 
money, but, as to entering my house — never ! " Hor- 
ror, hatred, and contempt for Boguey are, I believe, 
the only definite and sincere feelings of which Nous 
Autres are capable. 

I wish that I could leave M. Hyacinthe, the per- 
fumer, without telling you about somebody I met 
there one Sunday, (I used frequently to dine with 
that genial barber,) somebody whose face and voice, 
and gestures and miserable story, came with me 
adown the Gulf of Finland, and through the Baltic 
Sea ; came with me through the Little Belt up 



390 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

Flensburg Fjord ; came with me throughout the 
timber-town of E-endsburg, and by the iron way to 
Hamburg, and so to Brussels in Brabant, and at last 
to where I now write this. You shall hear. 

There is, perchance, no family circle so difficult of 
access as a French one. A man may live twenty 
years in France, without once enjoying even the 
spectre of a chance of being admitted into a French 
interior. You, boastful Paris men who pay your 
first-class fare at London Bridge at half-past eight, 
p. M., and are in Paris by half-past nine the next 
morning — who live in Paris for months, and fancy 
you know Paris life thoroughly — ^to what extent are 
you cognizant of the real ways and means, of the 
real manners and customs of the inscrutable Lute- 
tia ? You walk about the Boulevards or the Palais 
Royal ; you stay at Meurice's or the Hotel Bedford ; 
you dine at the Trois Fr^res or at Phillipe's ; you 
even, if you be of Bohemia, and determined to see 
life, live in the Rue St. Jacques, or that of the Ecole 
de Medecin, frequent the Prado and the Closerie 
des Lilas, and mistake some milliner's girl for 1B6- 
ranger's Lisette. Have you ever seen the French at 
home ? Do you know what manner of people they 
be ? When you do know, we shall have fewer fool- 
ish books written about foreign countries. But what 
am I saying about foreign countries ? Have I not 
been to a foreign country myself, and am I not (it 
may be) writing an excessively foolish book about 
it ? Are we not living in the days of embassies, and 
of literary secretaries of embassy who seem deter- 
mined to verify the maxim of Sir Henry Wotton ; — 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE). 891 

that " an ambassador is one sent abroad to lie for 
the good of his country ; " adding, by way of rider 
to his dictum, the axiom of La Rochefoucault, that 
" great names dishonour rather than elevate those 
who do not know how to bear them with propriety." 
Without enlarging at all upon any opportunities 
I might or might not have had of seeing French 
people at home, in their own country, I hope I may 
be allowed to allude to the very pleasant Sundays I 
spent with my friend the French barber. It was a 
model French interior. There was the grand old 
French lady with snow-white ringlets, tight, long, 
and cylindrical, like frozen sausages. There was the 
imbecile grandfather, with a black sUk skull-cap on 
his poor old pate, and his shrunken limbs wrapped in 
a gray duffell dressing-gown ; an old man past. every 
thing, except forbearance — weak, helpless, useless — - 
a baby come back to the primeval baldness, but un- 
commonly good at his meals— «-loved and tended, and 
cared for, however, as though he had been grand- 
father Weguelin, and could ask his grandchildren to 
tea in the bank parlour of the Bank of England 
every evening, and hand round to them boiled bul- 
lion, and sycee silver Sally Lunns. The picture 
would not be even artistically complete without a 
jeune personne — a blushing young maiden of six- 
teen — swathed up to the chin in white muslin, who 
is told that she must always keep her eyes cast 
down; who will be married shortly, to somebody 
she does not like ; and who will eventually run 
away, or otherwise misbehave herself, with some- 
body she does like. The middle distance would be 



392 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

wanting to the picture were I to omit a peculiarly- 
sharp boy in a black velvet jacket and sugar-loaf 
buttons, and a pair of cream-coloured trousers, much 
resembling — as regards their degree of inflation — 
balloons. A youth who is continually (and I am 
afraid with detriment to the progress of his studies) 
practising inquiries into the laws of gravitation, with 
a cup and ball, and who assuredly must do a con- 
siderable amount of damage to his father's stock of 
pomatum, if we are to take into consideration the 
prodigious accumulation of fatty substances patent 
on his hair. There would be something out of 
keeping, too, were the painter to omit the inevitable 
accessory to all French families at home or abroad, 
from Caen to Kamschatka, in the shape of an aunt, 
a cousin, a niece, a dependent of some sort, in fact— 
ordinarily a subdued female with a bulbous nose, 
and clad in very scanty, snuffy habiliments, who sits 
and works, and tends children, and is the friend of the 
family ; and whose only amusement, when she is 
left quite alone, seems to be to sit and cry her eyes 
out, with the assistance of a very sparse square of 
pocket-handkerchief. Her name is usually Made- 
moiselle Hortense. Last of all, there must perforce 
be put on the canvas a minute point of detail an- 
swering to the name of a poodle or a mongrel, as 
the case may be — a dog who does exactly as he 
likes, is addressed by affectionate nicknames by 
the simple French folk, and is generally made 
much of. 

Not last of all, at least in the barber's household. 
There was the old lady, the jeune personne, the vel- 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (THE POLICE). 393 

vet and sugar-loafed boy, the dubious aunt or niece, 
the dog ; and there was Somebody. 

A perfectly white, haggard, .worn-out, spectral 
girl. A girl robbed from her coffin. An awful sight, 
with restless, travelling eyes, with a horrible head 
rocking backwards and forwards, with hands con- 
tinually clasping and unclasping, with knees that 
(you could see beneath her drapery) continually 
sought each other, and then gave time to her feet, 
which beat the devil's tattoo incessantly. She had 
rich glossy hair, massed on each side of her head ; 
her eyes were dark and lustrous ; her teeth were 
gates of ivory ; her form was slender and graceful ; 
yet, had she been as hideous as the witch Sycorax, 
as terrible as Medusa, she could not with all her 
beauty, have impressed you with a greater sense of 
horror and back-shrinking. The girl was mad, of 
course. She was quite harmless, only rocking her- 
self backwards and forwards,- and rolling those wild 
eyes of hers, and (when she was unobserved) mut- 
tering something about her mother. She used to 
dine with us, and ply her knife and fork, and drink 
her weak wine and water with the best of the sane 
people present; but, she always relapsed into the 
rocking, and the rolling, and the muttering about her 
mother, as we were sitting down to dominoes or las- 
quenet. Nobody took much notice of her. She sat 
by the fire-place, with her haggard face, and a tight- 
fitting black velvet dress ; and, when she was spoken 
of, was alluded to as Cette pauvre Josephine. 

That poor Josephine's story was a very simple 
and a very sad one. She was the daughter of a 

17* 



394 A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

French dancing-master, long settled in Russia, and 
a Russian subject. Her mother had been some 
French ballet-dancer, who had waltzed away from 
her obligations, and had pirouetted into an utter 
abnegation of her social ties. Such things happen. 
She was Madame Somebody at Palermo, while her 
husband was Monsieur Somebody-else at Moscow. 
He had gained enough money by his profession to 
send his daughter to France for her education, 
whence she returned (to her misfortune) young, 
beautiful, and accomplished. Her father pleased 
himself with the notion that his Josephine must 
indubitably become the wife of some puissant 
seigneur; but, unfortunately, in the midst of this 
dream he died. He, it is to be remembered, had 
been naturalized a Russian subject, and his child 
was one after him. 

The girl, left alone and unfriended in this Gehenna 
of a country, fell. The dancing-master had dissi- 
pated all his economies of roubles, and she had no 
money. She went to St. Petersburg, having no 
money, in a caleche with eight horses (it was before 
the railway time,) with a government Padaroshna,* 

• 

* A padaroshna is an official permission to travel with post- 
horses, without which you might draw your carriage yourself, for 
no post-horses would you obtain. Government couriers have 
special padaroshnas, which entitle them to take horses before any 
other traveller ; and it is by no means uncommon at a post-house 
in the interior to see a serjeant of infantry, who happens to be a 
bearer of despatches, quietly order the horses just harnessed to a 
carriage containing a whole family, to be taken out, and attached 
to his own telega or kibitka. 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGUEY (tHB POLICE). 395 

and a courier riding twenty versts a-head to secure 
relays of horses. M. de SardanapalasofF, of the 
Empress's regiment of cuirassiers of the guard, took 
a magnificent apartment for her in the Italianskaia 
Oulitza ; she had a caleche, a brougham, a country- 
house — ^the very model of a Swiss chalet in the 
islands — saddle horses, a gondola with a velvet awn- 
ing, white satin cushions, and a Persian carpet ; a 
box at the Balschoi theatre, and one at the French 
house ; a lady's maid, a chasseur, a maitre d'hotel, 
a Danish dog nearly as large as a donkey, — every 
luxury, in fact. M. de Sardanapalasoff gave some 
magnificent champagne banquets at her apartments. 
La Beresina, as the Muscovite-Parisienne was called, 
was the reigning beauty of the demi-monde of St. 
Petersburg. A prince of the imperial blood posi- 
tively came to one of the Beresina's petit soupers, 
and deigned to express his opinion that she was 
charming. 

M. de SardanapalasofF 's mamma was the Prin- 
cess Zenobiaschkin, and he was the most dutiful of 
sons ; so, when she signified to him her maternal 
commands that he should obtain the imperial per- 
mission to travel for two years, and escort her to 
Paris, Italy, and the baths of Hombourg, he hastened 
to comply with her mandates in the most filial man- 
ner. Some unjust constructions were of course put 
on this alacrity. Some envious persons declared 
that the emperor himself had, through the medium 
of the Princess Zenobiaschkin offered the alterna- 
tive of foreign travel or the Caucasus to the young 
guardsman ; an of course unfounded report having 



396 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

got abroad that M. de SardanapalasofF while on duty 
at the palace of Tsarski-Selo, had been kicked in 
full uniform by a vindictive major of dragoons: the 
cause of the humiliating correction being alleged to 
be the detection of the Beresina's noble friend in the 
act of cheating at ecarte. Be it as it may, M. de 
SardanapalasofF was desolated to part with the 
Beresina, but he did it ; it must have aifected him 
greatly to be obliged to sell off the whole of his (or 
her) splendid furniture — nay, as much of her own 
private jewellery as he could, by fraud or force, lay 
his hands upon. So much did it affect him in fact, 
that he went off with the whole of the proceeds of 
the sale in his pocket, and left the Beresina without 
.a friend in the world, and with scarcely a hundred 
roubles in her pocket. 

Josephine (she had done with the name of the 
Beresina now) did not flow down that golden tide 
that runs over the sands of Shame in that great, salt, 
fathomless sea of tears, on which you shall descry 
no land on lee-bow, or weather-bow, save the head- 
lands of Death. With a stern and strong determina- 
tion to sin no more, she went to Moscow, where she 
had some acquaintances, if not friends. She was 
clever with her needle. She could embroider ; she 
could make bonnets ; she had both taste and talent. 
It was not long before she obtained employment in 
the shop of one of the most famous French milliners 
in Moscow. 

For her miisery, she was still very beautiful. I 
have said that the fashionable milliners of Moscow 
are dealers in other wares than millinery. The 



THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOaUEY (THE POLICE). 397 

buyers of those goods are the dissolute young nobles 
of the guard. Josephine might very soon have had 
another splendid suite of apartments, another chas- 
seur, another lady's maid, had she so pleased ; but 
the poor girl was sick of it, and was determined to 
be a milliner's workwoman all her life, rather than 
be a golden toy to be tossed aside when its attrac- 
tion had worn out. She refused solicitation after 
solicitation, offer after offer from the snuffy old 
French hag, (there is nothing so bad as a bad French 
woman,) into whose employ she had entered. This 
unprotected, outraged girl declared that she would 
no longer remain in her service. She would go, she 
said, that very instant, and rose to leaive the work- 
room. The woman put out her arm to prevent her 
passing the threshold, and Josephine naturally pushed 
it away. This was all the milliner wanted. 

" Very well, very well I " she said, " bear witness, 
mesdemoiselles all, this person, my servant — my 
SERVANT, mind — has been guilty of insubordination 
and rebellion towards me, her mistress. We shall 
see, we shall see ! " 

She went that day and lodged a complaint against 
her workwoman at the police-office. The girl was 
a Russian subject, and the daughter ©f a Russian 
subject, and there was no help for her on this side 
Heaven. She was arrested that afternoon, and car- 
ried to the Si^ge, her mistress accompanying her. 
There, in the bureau, she was asked certain ques- 
tions, the milliner signed a paper and paid certain 
moneys to the aide-major of police, and Josephine 
was led away by two of the gray-coats. 



398 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

That same night, very late, a French hairdresser 
settled in Moscow, who was crossing the Smith's 
Bridge on his way home, was fortunate enough to 
rescue a woman, who, without bonnet or shawl, was 
standing on the parapet of the bridge, and was just 
about to cast herself into the Moskva. There was, 
luckily, no Boutotsnik, or watchman, near, or it 
would have fared ill with both preserver and pre- 
served. The kindly barber took this miserable crea- 
ture, who could do nothing but sob and wail, and 
ejaculate, " O Mother, Mother!" — he took her to his 
home, and delivering her to his womankind, enjoined 
them to treat her with every care and solicitude. 
They told him, the next morning, that when they 
came to undress her, they had found her from the 
shoulder to the waist one mass of bloody wheals. 
The police had simply done their infamous duty. 
The miUiner, her mistress, had a perfect right to 
order her to be flogged ; she had paid for the flog- 
ging ; and the police had nothing further to do, save 
to inflict. The unhappy creature had been beaten 
with rods, (willow canes split each into three,) and in 
the frenzy of her agony and shame had immediately 
after her liberation from the police-den of torture, 
rushed to the river with the intention of committing 
suicide. 

The hairdresser, than whom a kinder-hearted 
seizer of ringlets never existed, would not allow this 
poor waif and stray to depart out of his house. 
Learning by degrees her unhappy story, he offered 
her an asylum, and treated her as one, of his own 
children. She went on improving for a time ; but 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 399 

by degrees she fell into a sable melancholy. When 
I saw her, she had been mad for eighteen months. 

I have done, now, for very sickness, with the judi- 
cial police. I have heard some curious tales, in 
my time, about the Austrian police, and about the 
Neapolitan police, which all plain men know to be 
intolerably abominable. The employes of the Rue 
de Jerusalem are not wholly immaculate, I believe ; 
nay, under our honest, hard-working, plain-sailing, 
Scotland Yard regime^ we have had policemen who 
have stolen geese, and others who have broken into 
houses. But, as grand masters of the art and mys- 
tery of villany ; as proficients in lying, stealing, 
cruelty, rapacity, and impudence ; I will back the 
Russian police against the whole world of knavery. 



xvm. 

MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 



I HAVE in my possession a square piece of yellow 
paper, highly varnished, and with one corner torn 
off, on which there is the ordinary amount of typo- 
graphical Abracadabra, or Russian word-spinning, 
inevitably to be found in all Russian documents ; 
namely, as much as can possibly be squeezed into 
the space available, and headed (it is almost super- 
fluous to remark) by a portrait en pied of that mon- 



400 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ster Bird, that Roc of Russia, and yet decided oppo- 
site to a Rara Avis, the double-headed Eagle. This 
document is as large as one of those French sched- 
ules of insolvency, a Reconnaissance of the Mont de 
Piet^, and is considerably bigger than an English 
excise permit. It is, in reality, no such formidable 
affair; but simply a pass check (something billiet in 
Russ) to the orchestra stalls of the Gossudaria- 
Tchirk-Teatr,' or Imperial Circus Theatre of St. 
Petersburg. 

There never was, under Jove — with the exception 
of the Mandarinized inhabitants of the Flowery 
Land, who, in a thousand respects, might run or be 
driven in couples with the Muscovites — such a na- 
tion of filling up formalists as are the Russians. In 
Russia, indeed, can you appreciate in its highest 
degree the inestimable benefits of a lot of forms. 
The Russian five-copeck (twopenny-halfpenny) post- 
age-stamp is as important-looking, as far as fierce- 
ness and circumference go, as that foul mass of 
decayed rosin and wax, symbolizing rottenness and 
corruption somewhere, whilom attached, in a species 
of shallow pill-box, at the end of a string to a patent, 
and called the Great Seal of England. If, in St. 
Petersburg or Moscow, you wish to post a letter for 
foreign parts, and send your servant with it to the 
Gossudaria-Pochta, or Imperial post, he brings you 
back an immense pancake, like a Surrey Garden's 
posting bill, with your name, and your correspond- 
ent's name, and columns of figures, denoting the 
amount of copecks charged for postage, and the date, 
and signatures, and countersignatures, and a big 



MUSIC AND THE DTIAMA. 401 

double eagle, in black, at the top, and a smaller one 
in blue at the bottom, and a great sprawling white 
one in the water-mark, besides the usual didactic 
essay upon things in general in incomprehensible 
E-uss ; all which cautious, minute, and business-like 
formalities do not prevent the frequent failure to 
reach its destination of your letter, and its as fre- 
quent seal- breaking and spying-into by officials in 
its transit through the post-office. 

Petropolis, considering its enormous size, has by 
no means a profusion of theatres. There is the 
superb Balschoi-Teatr' ; the Grand Opera, where 
Grisi and Mario sing, and Cerito and BagdanofF 
dance. The Great Theatre was originally erected by 
Semiramis- Catherine ; then reconstructed in eigh- 
teen hundred and three, and in the reign of the first 
Alexander, by the architect Thomon. It was burnt 
down, according to the rule of the Three Fates, in 
all theatrical cases made and provided, in eighteen 
hundred and eleven ; when another French architect, 
M. Mauduit, was intrusted with the task of acting as 
a vicarious phoenix, and raising the theatre from its 
ashes. Some acoustic defects having been found, 
nevertheless, to exist in the new edifice, the Czar 
Nicholas caused M. Cavos, again a Frenchman, to 
turn it as completely inside out, as our old Covent 
Garden was turned by Mr. Albano. It is now, with 
the exception of the Grand Theatre at Moscow, the 
most magnificent and the most convenient of all the 
theatres in Europe, and (I believe) as large a theatre 
as any. The Scala may surpass it, slightly, in size 
but in splendour of appointment it is, so the cos- 



402 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

mopolite operatics say, a mere penny gaff to the 
Balschoi. At the Grand Theatre, take place, during 
the carnival, the famous Bal Masques of St. Peters- 
burg. 

Next, the northern capital possesses the Alexandra 
Theatre, situated in the place, or square, as the gal- 
licized Russians call it, which bears the same name, 
and opens on the Nevskoi' Perspective. The Alex- 
andra Theatre is the home of the Russian drama; 
that is, purely Russian plays (on purely Russian 
subjects) are there performed. Thirdly, there is the 
Theatre Michel, in the Place Michel, also on the 
Nevskoi, built in eighteen hundred and thirty-three, 
under the direction of M. BrulofF; which elegant and 
aristocratic dramatic temple may be called the St. 
James's Theatre of St. Petersburg, being devoted to 
the alternate performances of French and German 
troupes, and — being closed a good many months in 
the year. There is a fourth and very pretty theatre, 
built of wood, in the island of Kammenoi-Ostrow, 
or Stone Island, (so called from a huge mass of 
stone on its banks in the Little Nevka,) a Swiss cot- 
tage kind of affair embosomed among trees, and 
which stands in front of the bridge leading to the 
island of Yelaguine. In this theatrical chalet, the 
French vaudeville company give representations dur- 
ing the summer ; the islands at that season being 
crammed with the elite of the aristocratic Peters- 
burgian society — at least of that numerous section 
thereof who can't afford, or who can't obtain the 
government permission to travel. There was an- 
other and extensive theatre, likewise built of timber, 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 403 

on "Wassily-Ostrow; but, it was burnt down some 
years since, and being a simply German theatre was 
allowed, contemptuously, to sink into oblivion, and 
was never rebuilt. There is but one, and the fifth 
theatre, that remains to be noticed, and that is the 
Tchirk, or Circus Theatre, and thither, if you please, 
we will pay a visit this night. 

This is not by any means the first theatre I have 
visited since I have been biting the dust of Peters- 
burg. I have been to the German house, at the 
pressing recommendation of Barnabay, backed by 
ZacharaV, and have seen a German farce, of which 
I have understood very little, if any thing; but from 
which I have come away screaming with laughter. 
It was called Der Todte Neffe^ (the Dead Nephew,) 
and was from the pen of that dramatic writer who 
has made me have recourse to my knuckles (I was 
ashamed to use my pocket-handkerchief) many and 
many a time in that stupid, delightful, unnatural, 
life-like, tedious, enthralling, ridiculous, sublime, 
worthless, and priceless drama of the Stranger — I 
mean Herr von Kotzebue. Why is it, I wonder, 
that so mf.ny men who know this play to be one 
of the worst that ever was written, that it is as 
much an insult to art as to common sense, yet in a 
secret, furtive manner, love to see it, and had they 
the privilege of a bespeak — as the mayor and the 
regimental-colonel have in a garrison town — would 
command it for that night only ! I do not care 
one doit for the sorrows of Miss Clarissa Harlowe : 
shamefully as Mr. Lovelace behaved to her. I have 
not the slightest sympathy with Miss Pamela An- 



404 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

drews's virtue or its reward, and declare that on my 
conscience I believe her to have been an artful and 

designing jade, who had her eye on Squire B 

from the commencement, and caught him at last 
with a hook. I think that Mademoiselle Virginie 
lost her life through a ridiculous piece of mock 
modesty, and that she would have bored Paul 
awfully had she been married to him. I am of 
opinion that six months with hard labour in the 
House of Correction would have done Manon Les- 
caut all the good in the world. For me, Werter 
may go on blowing out his batter-pudding brains, 
and Charlotte may continue cutting butter-brods, 
and wiping the little noses of her little brothers and 
sisters, to infinity. I have no tears for any of these 
sentimentalities ; but, for that bad English version 
of a worse German Play — ^the Stranger — I have 
always an abashed love and a shy reverence, and 
an unwearied patience. I can always bear with 
Peter, and his papa with the cane, and the countess 
who comes off a journey in a hat and feathers and a 
green velvet pelisse, and Miss Adelaide Haller the 
housekeeper, and that melancholy dingy man in 
black who has fixed upon Cassel for his abode. I 
don't tell people that I am going to see the Stranger; 
but I go, and come home quite placid, and for the 
time moral, and full of good thoughts and quiet 
emotions. For who amongst us has not done a 
wrong, but repents in secret places where vanity 
is of no avail, and where there are none to tell him 
that he is in the right, and that he " oughtn't to 
stand it, my boy ? " And who has not been wronged, 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 405 

that but seeks solace in sowing forgiveness broad- 
cast, because he thinks the tares in that one place 
where forgiveness is most needed are too thick for 
any good seed to bear fruit there ? And who has 
lost a lamb, and wandering about seeking it, can 
refrain from pleasant thinkings when he comes upon 
a flock, though his firstling be not among them, and 
can stay himself from interest and cheerful imagin- 
ings in the joys and sorrows of little children ? That 
Italian songstress who sings so rrragnificently, in 
which is she greater : in the " Qual cor tradisti,''^ 
where she pours out the vials of a woman's resent- 
ment and vindictiveness upon that contemptible cur 
in the helmet, PoUio ; or in the duet with Adalgisa, 
where the children are ? I saw the other night, in 
the pit of the Haymarket Theatre, during the per- 
formance of a pantomime, for which Mr. Buckstone 
had provided the fun, and Mr. William Calcott had 
painted the pictures — the " Babes in the Wood " — 
I saw a great, burly, red-faced man in a shaggy 
great-coat and a wide-awake hat, who looked very 
much like a commercial traveller for a Bradford 
cloth-house, blubbering — that is simply the word — 
at a superbly ridiculous part of the entertainment, 
where the Kobins (represented by half-a-dozen stal- 
wart " supers " in bird masks and red waistcoats, 
like parish beadles) come capering in, and after an 
absurd jig to the scraping of some fiddles, cover up 
the babes who have been abandoned by their cruel 
uncle, with green leaves. And the Stranger will be 
popular to the end of time — as popular as the Nor- 
folk tragedy-*-because it is about forgiveness, and 



406 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

love, and mercy, and children ; and here is the health 
of Herr von Kotzebue, though he was a poor writer, 
and (I have heard it whispered) a government spy. 

The week I arrived in Petersburg was the last of 
the season of the Grand Opera ; and I had the 
pleasure of enjoying some toe-pointed stanzas of 
the poetry of motion as rendered by the agile limbs 
of the renowned Russian dancer, Mademoiselle Bag- 
danofF. The Russians are deliriously proud of this 
favoured child^of Terpsichore. The government 
will not aUow her to dance, even out of the Grand 
Opera season, on any stage in the empire, save 
those of the two great theatres in Petersburg and 
Moscow, where the prices are high, the audience 
aristocratically cold, aristocratically blase and ennuye^ 
and aristocratically broken-in to the laws of Western 
aristocratic etiquette. For, were the BagdanofF to 
dance at a native Russian theatre, the audience 
would infallibly encore her at least eight times after 
every pas ; and the poor child would be danced off 
her legs. The Russians aifect to sneer at Cerito 
and Rosati, and Fanny Ellsler ; they only conde- 
scend to admit Taglioni to have been incomparable 
because she has retired from the stage, and has mar- 
ried a Russian prince. Plunket, Fleury, Fusco, 
Guy-Stephan,- they will not have at any price. 
The BagdanofF is their Alpha and Omega as a 
dancer. Last spring she was more the rage than 
ever. Her portrait, lithographed, was in all the 
printsellers' windows, with a sprawling autograph 
at the base, and a German epigraph at the summit : 
— " In lebe immer die selbe^'' " In lo^je always the 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 407 

same." I don't know why ; but this motto always 
gave me an idea of an implied defiance or implied 
guarantee. It seems to say : " Advance, ye Crimean 
field-marshals, ye Caucasian generals, ye aids-de- 
camp of the Emperor, ye members of the directing 
senate, ye attaches of foreign legations. Don't be 
afraid ! Approach and place your diamond brace- 
lets, your bouquets with a bank-note for a thousand 
roubles twisted round the stem, your elegant coupes 
with coal-black horses, your five-hundred-rouble sable 
pelisses, at the feet of Nadiejda BagdanofF. Walk 
up. There is no deception. In love she is always 
the same." I saw Mademoiselle Bagdanoff, and 
didn't like her. Have I not seen Her (with a large 
H) dance ? She flung her limbs about a great deal ; 
and in dancing, as in love, she was immer die selbe 
— always the same. It afterwards fell out that from 
the fumes of that great witch's caldron of Russian 
gossip, the Samovar, I distilled a somewhat curious 
reason for the immense popularity of the Bagdanoff. 
The imperial government granted her a ticket of 
leave, or passport for foreign travel, just before the 
war with the allied powers broke out. Nadiejda 
went abroad, remained two years, and came back 
at last, radiant, as Mademoiselle BagdanofF, of the 
Academic Imperiale de Musique at Paris. She had 
stormed the Rue Lepelletier ; she had subdued the 
Parisians ; she had vanquished the stubborn hearts 
and claque-compelling white-gloved palms of those 
formidable three first rows of fauteuils d'orchestre, 
courted and dreaded by all cantatrice, by all balle- 
dne. In a word she had triumphed; but it was 



408 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

never exactly ascertained in what ballet she made 
her debut. It was certain, however, that she had 
been engaged at the iVcad^mie, and that her engage- 
ment had been rescinded during the war time ; the 
manager having, with fiendish ingenuity, endeav- 
oured to seduce her into dancing in a ballet whose 
plot was inimical to Russian interests. But, th^e 
fair Nadiejda, patriotic as fearless, indignantly re- 
fused to betray her country and her Czar. She tore 
her engagement into pieces ; she stamped upon it ; 
she gave the directors of the Academic Imp^riale a 
piece of her mind : she demanded her passports, and 
danced back to St. Petersburg — there to -be feted, 
and caressed, and braceleted, and ear-ringed, and 
bouqueted, and reengaged at the Balschoi Teatr' 
at a higher salary ; and, by Jupiter ! were she not 
lucky enough to be a crown serf, instead of a slave 
at obrok, to be sent back to her proprietor's village 
whenever he was so minded, there to be made to 
dance her best pas seuls for her noble proprietor's 
amusement, when he and his guests were drunk 
with wine ; there, if she offended him, to be sent to 
hew wood and draw water, to go clad in gray sack- 
ing, instead of gauze and silk, and spangles ; to have 
those tresses shorn away, whereon the diamond 
sprays glittered so bravely now ; to be beaten with 
rods when her master was in a bad temper, and 
compelled unmurmuringly to pick up the handker- 
chief he designed to throw her when amiably dis- 
posed. 

If the BagdanofF deserved the gold medal, which 
I believe was awarded to her by the government for 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 409 

the Spartan fortitude with which she had withstood 
the insidious promptings of the malevolent Fran- 
soutz, she was certainly entitled to the medal of St. 
Anne of the first class, set in brilliants of the finest 
water, for the heroism she displayed in coming back 
to Russia at all. The return of Regulus to Car- 
thage was nothing to it. Shiningly, indeed, does 
her self-denying conduct contrast with that of the^ 
other (vocal) operatic star, M. Ivanhoff, who, being 
a slave, and a pupil of the Imperial Vocal Acad- 
emy, and possessing a remarkably fine voice, was 
commanded by the Czar to repair to Italy, there to 
perfect himself in the art of singing, and then to 
return to Petersburg, to delight the habitues of the 
Balschoi" Teatr' with his dulcet strains. The faith- 
less Ivanhoff went, and saw, and conquered all the 
difficulties of his art; but he never came back 
AGAIN : withstanding, with an inflexible pertinacity, 
the instances of ambassadors and the commands of 
ministers. " Well oat of it," thought M. Ivanhoff; 
and betook himself to making money for himself 
with admirable sprightliness and energy. He made 
a fortune ; retired from the stage ; bought an estate ; 
and was ungrateful enough to live and enjoy him- 
self thereupon, utterly unmindful of his kind friends 
in Russia, who were anxious that he should return, 
and to assure him that the past should be forgotten, 
that his wishes should be fully met, and that the 
warmest of receptions awaited him. 
/ I cannot tell the title of the ballet whose subject 
the Bagdanoff considered inimical to Russian inter- 
ests ; but there are very many dramatic and oper- 
18 



410 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

atic performances that lie under the ban of the 
Muscovite Boguey, on the inimical plea. M. Scribe's 
vaudeville of the Verre d'Eau is proscribed in Rus- 
sia. Rossini's William Tell, has, of course, never 
been heard there in public. The Etoile du Nord 
achieved an immense success ; but as there were 
some inconvenient little matters in the libretto about 
Peter the Great's madness and drunkenness, the 
title was quietly metamorphosed into Charles the 
Twelfth. So with numerous dramas and operas 
with inconvenient titles or inconvenient incidents. 
Have any of my readers ever heard of an opera, 
usually considered to be the chef d^ceuvre of Auber, 
in which there is a market chorus, and a tumult, and 
a dumb girl, and an insurgent fisherman riding on a 
horse from the circus ? That dear old round-nosed, 
meek-eyed white horse, that seems to be the only 
operatic horse in the world, for he is himself alone 
his parallel, and nought else could be it, in any 
country I have visited : — a patient horse, bearing 
burly baritones, or timid tenors, or prima donnas, 
inclined to embonpoint^ with equal resignation ; a 
safe horse, never shying at the noise of the big drum, 
never kicking out at the supers, and, above all, 
never, as I am always afraid he will, inclining his 
body from his centre of gravity at an angle of sixty 
degrees, and setting off in a circular canter round 
the stage with his mane and tail streaming in the 
opposite direction, till brought to a sense of his not 
being at Franconi's or Astley's by a deficiency of 
whip, and an absence of saw-dust, and a sudden 
conviction that there must be something wrong, as 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 411 

his rider is sitting on his back, instead of standing 
thereupon on the saddle with the red velvet table- 
cloth, and is uttering shrieks of terror, instead of 
encouraging cries of " Houp la ! " There is a gen- 
eral blow-up and eruption of volcanoes at the end of 
this opera, and it is known, unless I am very much 
mistaken, by the name of Masaniello. They play 
it in Russia ; but, by some means or other, the tu- 
mult, the market scene, and the insurgent fisherman, 
have all disappeared ; there is nothing left but the 
dumb girl, and the beautiful music, and the blow-up ; 
and the opera is called Fenella. The other elements 
(to say nothing of the name of that bold rebel : oh, 
scour me the Chiaja and turn up the sleepers at Na- 
ples' street-corners, for another Masaniello ; for we 
live in evil days, and the paralytic remnants of the 
Holy Alliance are crying out to be knocked down 
and jumped upon, and thrown out of window, and 
put out of their pain as soon as possible) — those 
revolutionary elements would suggest allusions, and. 
those allusions might be inimical to Russian interests. 
There was a little bird in Petersburg, in these lat- 
ter days of mine, who went about whispering (very 
cautiously and low, for if that big bird, the Double 
Eagle, had been aware of him, he would have 
stopped his whispering for good) that there was 
another reason for the BagdanoiF's secession from 
the Academic at Paris. The French, this little bird 
said, quite confidently, though quietly — the French 
wouldn't have her ! She had rehearsed, and the 
minister of state had shaken his head. The Jockey 
Club had presented a petition against her. The 



412 ^ A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ahonnes had drawn up a memorial against her. 
They considered her to be inimical to French inter- 
ests. Two feuilletonistes of the highest celebrity and 
social position had declared publicly that they would 
decline and return the retaining fee, sent by debu- 
tantes and accepted by feuilletonistes, as a matter 
of course, in such cases. In fact, the BagdanofF was 
crevee before she ever saw the French foot-lights 
twinkle, and if she had not pirouetted away Due 
North as fast as her ten toes would permit her, she 
would in another week have been caricatured in the 
Journal pour Rire — figuration in which formidable 
journal is equivalent to civil death on the Continent. 

All ,of which minor gossip on things theatrical 
and operatic you may imagine, if you like, to have 
been useful to wile away the time this hot afternoon. 
Signor Fripanelli and I have been dining at Mad- 
ame Aubin's French table d'hote at the corner of 
the Cannouschnia or Great Stable Street ; and 
have agreed to visit the Circus Theatre in the even- 
ing to see Lucrezia Borgia, the opera : music by 
the usual Donizetti, but words translated into Russ. 
I anticipated a most awful evening of maxillary- 
bones-breaking sounds. Fancy " Di pescatore ig-no- 
bile " in Slavonic ! 

Fripanelli and yours truly have proceeded, dinner 
being over, to Dominique's cafe on the Nevskoi, 
there to do the usual coffee and chasse ; and at the 
door of that dreary and expensive imitation of Big- 
non's or Richards's stands the Signor's droschky, 
(for Frip is a prosperous gentleman ; gives you, at 
his own rooms, as good Lafitte as you can obtain 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 413 

on this side Tilsit ; and has a private droschky to 
hiniself, neat, shining lamps, tall horse, and coach- 
man in a full suit of India-rubber.) " One mast 
'ave, oun po di louxe," a little luxury, the Signor 
tells me, as if to apologize for his turn out. " If I 
vas drive op ze Princesse KapoustikofF vith Ischvost- 
chik, sapete, fifty copeck, zay would take too rouble 
from my next lesson. Ah ! quel pays ! quel pays ! " 
" Imagine yourself," (to translate his polyglot into 
something approximating to English,) he tells me as 
we sip the refreshing Mocha and puff at the papiros. 
— " Imagine yourself, I go to the Countess Panck- 
schka. She receive me how ? As the maestro di 
canto ? Of none. I sit at the piano-forte, and 
open the book and wait to hear that woman sing 
false as water, that which always she do. Is it that 
she sing? Of none. She sits and makes little 
plaits in her robe, and spins little gold toys, and 
says, Signor Fripanelli, what is there of news en 
ville. Tell me, I pray you, all the cancans you 
heard last night at the Princess Kapoustikoff's. 
What, devil ! I go to-morrow to the KapoustikofFs, 
and she says. Tell me, Signor of mine, what is there 
of new en ville, and who are the imbecile whom 
that old woman, ugly, the Countess Panckschka, 
can now persuade to enter her faded saloons. Deity 
of mine, this they call taking lessons of the song ! 
And if you do not talk cancans; if you say that 
you are a master of music, and not a merchant of 
news ; they will write. to you a billet with but this 
sole line in it. Monsieur^ je ne vous connais plus, Sir, 
I know you no longer ; and no longer will they know 



414 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

you, or the two, five, eight hundred roubles they owe 
you, besides their bad tongues, ruining your fame 
and honour in salons with histories of lies that you 
know not your art ; that you are of the Jew, and 
have been galerian-) Id bas, down there with letters 
marked on your back for theft of watches from 
mantelpiece, and have wife without bread in Ber- 
gamo, whom in the time you bastinadoed because 
she would not dance on the cord," (the tight-rope, I 
presume.) 

The recital of Fripanelli's woes carries us well out 
of Dominique's, and his droschky takes us at an 
enlivening rate towards the theatre* Frip has been 
years in Petersburg, yet I question whether he has 
ever walked ten miles in it since his arrival. 
" What to do ? " he asks, lifting up his hands, and 
shrugging up his shoulders. " To walk, where ? 
Among these wild men savage, these barbarous ? 
Of not." He knows the Nevskoi, the Italianskaia, 
the English and Palace Quays, the two Morskaia's 
and the Litennaia, because in those streets his aris- 
tocratic patrons reside. He has heard of Wassily- 
Ostrow, and has been (in a gondola) to Kammenoli- 
Ostrow, the Princess or the Countess Panckschka 
having a chalet there in the summer ; also to Tsar- 
ski- Selo, and even as far as Pavlowsk by railway, 
for he gives lessons to one of the Grand-Duchesses. 
He has seen the outside of the Gostinnoi-dvor ; but 
he is quite ignorant of what manner of markets 
exist behind that stately edifice. He knows not 
the Gorokhovai'a from Adam ; and if you were to 
tell him that the Nevskoi started from the shores of 



MUSIC AND THE DRAMA. 415 

the Neva, at right-angles to it, and ended three 
miles off, still on the shores of the Neva, and still at 
right-angles thereto, he would stare with aston- 
ishment.* I could show you full a score of foreign 
residents in Petersburg who are brethren in igno- 
rance to Fripanelli, and have been as long in Rus- 
sia, and know as little of it as he. * 

This good-natured little music-master is madly 
in love with the Queen of Sheba. He is most 
respectful and quite hopeless in his attachment, 
never telling his love to its object, but allowing 
concealment to prey on his olive cheek. Watching 
him, however, at his music lessons, while the Queen 
is singing (and she sings divinely), I catch him 
furtively wiping his right eyelid with the extreme 
end of a very fine cambric handkerchief. He com- 
poses romances and cavatinas for the Queen to sing, 
which, when she sings, makes him urticate his eye- 
lid more than ever. He weeps frequently to me 
over coffee on the subject. Elle n^a pas de Vdme, 
*" She has not of the soul," he says. " If she knew 
how to shed the tears as well as how to beam the 
smiles, she would be la Donna of the world. But 
she cannc^t. Elle nia pas de VdmeP And so we go 
to the Circus. 

* Here the Neva forms an arc in its myriad windings, and the 
JSFevskoi is the chord of the arc. The difficulty of orienting one's 
self without a compass in Petersburg, or finding out whether you 
are steering topographically, is positively distracting. Owing to 
the twistings and twinings of the river, the innumerable back 
waters, branches, canals, and bridges, you may walk five miles 
and still find yourself over against where you started from. 



416 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

Which, beyond being externally circular in form, 
(with the ordinary quadrangular excrescences insep- 
arable from round buildings,) and having been, it 
may be, originally built with a vague view towards 
equestrian performances at some future period, has 
nothing whatever to do with horses. For, as you 
already know, it is the home of operas sung in 
Russ. 

We heard Lucrezia Borgia, and I confess that I 
was most agreeably disappointed. I became con- 
vinced that the epithet " soft-flowing Russ " is one 
eminently due to the mother-tongue of our late 
enemies. It is, indeed, for vocal purposes a most 
mellifluous and harmonious language, and, for 
softness and euphony, is about five hundred per 
cent, more suited to musical requirements than the 
French language. As to its superiority over our 
own (for singing) I at once and candidly admit it. 
I don't think that from my due northern antece- 
dents, I shall be accused of entertaining any very 
violent Russian sympathies, or that I shall be de-' 
nounced as an emissary of the Czar in disguise, 
when I appeal to all linguists to bear me out in the 
assertion, that our own English tongue is the very 
worst language in the world for singing. There is 
an incessant hiss in the pronunciation which is as 
annoying as it is productive of cacophony ; and I 
would sooner hear Lucrezia half-a-dozen times over 
in Russ than in English. As to the opera itself, it 
was, as I dare say it is all the world over — at the 
Scala, the Pergola, and the Fenice ; at the St. 
Charles at New Orleans, at the opera in Pera, at 



TCHOKNI NAROD : (tHE BLACK PEOPLE.) 417 

the Tacon theatre in Havana, at our own great 
houses, or in country theatres, occupied for the 
nonce by some peripatetic opera company — always 
beautiful, glorious, fresh, and one which shall endure 
for aye, like the grand old marbles of those who 
have gone before, though legions of Goths and Van- 
dals, though myriads of Keemo Kimos and My 
Mary Anns shall have desecrated its altars and pro- 
faned its hearth. 



XIX. 

TCHORNI NAROD: (tHE BLACK PEOPLE.) 

The Black People I am going to tell about are 
not of the unhappy race of Ham, though they are 
intimately connected with, and are, indeed, the 
bone, and basis, and marrow of, the Domestic In- 
stitution of the Russian empire. The Russians (I 
feel a glow of pleasure come over me when I have 
any thing positively favourable to say of them) are 
entirely free from any prejudice against negroes. I 
think, on the whole, they would rather have Uncle 
Tom made Governor of Woronesch, than find an 
individual of German extraction appointed to a 
clerkship in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The 
people's — ^the Tchorni-Narods' — notion concerning 
negroes is peculiar and preposterous, but harmless. 
They call them Obeziania monkeys ; and, perhaps, 

18* 



418 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

imagine them to be bipeds of the genus Simia, who 
have compromised themselves by speaking, and 
who, as a natural consequence of their indiscretion, 
have been made to work, like any other inferior 
human beings. The poet, whom his countrymen 
delight to call the Byron of Russia, was the lineal 
descendant of a negro slave, purchased by Peter the 
Great when very young ; he was sent to Paris to be 
educated, and afterwards rose to high command in 
his service. Yet he never suffered any discredit 
through the sable complexion of his great-grand- 
father. He was M. de Pouschkin ; and held lands 
and serfs, and fell in a duel with a Russian noble. 
Had he been born in a, say, less despotic country, 
that damning evidence in his finger-nails would 
have been sufficient to banish him firom every table- 
d'hote, from every railway car, and from every place 
of worship, save the black one ; and to place him in 
danger of a cowhiding if he presumed to walk on a 
public promenade with a white woman. Yet the 
Russians are as white as I am — or as you are. 

The Tchorni Narod is briefly the generic name 
familiarly given to the great popular element in 
Russia ; the Black People 'are the equivalents for 
our great unwashed, or enlightened public, or raffish 
mob, or free and independent citizens, or swinish 
multitude, or the masses, or the lower orders, or 
whatsoever else you choose to call the English 
people, according to your high and mighty taste. 
The Tchorni Narod is the people that enlists, digs, 
delves, cheers, throws brickbats, takes the horses of 
His Serene Excrescence the Grand Duke from his 



TCHORNI NAROD : (tHE BLACK PEOPLE.) 419 

carriage, and draws him in triumph to the palace ; 
tears his S. E. into small pieces sometimes, and 
carries his head about on a pole ; is drunken, mad, 
vicious ; prudishly moral, indignant, indulgent, en- 
thusiastic, icy cold, by turns, and, for a short time ; 
that surges about like a sea and has its ebb and 
flow, its tempests and calms, as capriciously as 
that monster ; that brings forth pale children, and is 
not washed nor taught, but works, and is beaten, 
and soddens, and starves. 

How many weeks have these journey-notes been 
cast on the waters of publicity, and how little, have 
I told of the real people I came all these leagues to 
observe, and study, and paint in words, and strive 
to understand and distil the truth from ! The 
Ischvostchik ; the Starosta and his belongings down 
at that gray Russian Dumbledowndeary of mine 
yonder ; the bearded man in the red shirt at Heyde's ; 
and a moujik I have caught up here and there, 
staring in at a shop window ; these are all the popu- 
lar Russian types I have as yet given. Yet, what 
should I myself think of an American, or a French, 
or a German — or to speak prospectively — of a New 
Zealand traveller, who came among us, English 
people, to depict our national manners and customs, 
and who confined himself chiefly to sketches of 
eccentric foreigners he had met at table-d'hotes in 
Leicester Squsre or Soho, to the description of a 
Spanish boarding-house in Finsbury, a German 
sugar-baker's in Whitechapel, a Chinese crimp's in 
Rotherhithe, a Lascar beggar's den in Referden 
Street, an Italian organ-grinder and image haunt off* 



420 A JOUKNEY DUE NORTH. 

Leather Lane, a French caf^ in the Hay market, the 
Portuguese walk on 'Change, or a Parisian ballet at 
Her Majesty's theatre ; — leaving out all the real 
true-born British characteristics of London ; the 
cabmen, prize-fighters, oyster-women, coster-mong- 
ers, jockeys, crossing-sweepers, policemen, beggars, 
Quakers, garotters, Barclay and Perkins's draymen, 
Argyle gents, compositors, barristers, apple-women, 
authors, and ticket-of-leave men ? 

I know that my intentions, in the first instance, 
•were conscientious. "Be it mine," I said, the very 
first night I lay down in my bed in the family vault 
at Heyde's, " to take this Russian people, and spread 
it out between sheets of paper like caviare in a sand- 
wich for the million at home to digest as best they 
may. But, dear and forbearing reader, I couldnH 
find the people. Over sixty millions of souls does 
this empire contain ; yet types of character are not 
to be picked up at the rate of more than one a day, 
on the average. 

A Russian crowd is as rare a thing to be met 
with, as Johannisberg at a second-rate hotel, or a 
fine day in Fleet Street. Moscow coronations do 
not happen every day, notwithstanding that stock 
story told of Peter, Alexander I., Nicholas, and the 
present sovereign, as well of, if I mistake not, our 
George the Fourth, and the French Charles the 
Tenth, of the enthusiastic but inconsequent young 
lady, who was so delighted with the Kremlin solem- 
nities, that she begged the Czar to let his subjects 
have another coronation as soon as possible. Popu- 
lar gatherings are studiously discouraged by the 



TCHORNI NAROD : (THE BLACK PEOPLE.) 421 

government. The moujiks cry Gossudar, Gossudar ! 
(the Lord, the Lord I) when the Czar comes flying 
along in his droschky ; if they must needs be near 
him, they crouch down bareheaded, and bite the 
dust. Islers, the Sommer- Garten, the Wauxhall, at 
Pavlowsk, and the gardens of Tsarski-Selo, — which, 
in St. Petersburg, like the Sparrow-hills and the 
Hermitage Gardens, at Moscow, are very nearly all 
the places of out-door public reunion in the two 
capitals, — are tabooed to the moujik ; dancing al 
fresco is forbidden ; street shows are forbidden ; 
street bands are forbidden. I have not the slight- 
est wish to be suspected of pretending to polyglot 
attainments ; yet such a suspicion may perhaps 
arise from the names drawn from different lan- 
guages I have given to different buildings and 
things in St. Petersburg. The Russian name for 
the Sommer- Garten is (I believe) the Dvorsovaia 
Sad, yet it is very rarely translated into French as 
th« Jardin d'Et^, but is almost invariably spoken 
of by the Russians (when speaking Russ) by the 
German appellation of Sommer- Garten. Perhaps 
it was laid out by a German Gardener. Again the 
Police-Bridge is scarcely ever called by its Rus- 
sian name (save when directing an Ischvostchik) of 
the Polineisky Most, but is accepted and Gallicised 
as Le Pont de Police. Again, I never heard the 
English Quay (Angliskaia Nabirejenaia in Russ) so 
spoken of by a Russian, even when speaking Eng- 
lish, — it is always Le Quay Anglais ; and, lastly, 
Basil's Island, or L'ile de Basile, is peremptorily 
restricted, this time, to its Russian name of Was- 



422 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

sily Ostrow. At fires, the soldiers, the firemen, and 
the thieves (a fire is quite a government affair in 
Russia, and a member of the imperial family, if not 
the Czar himself, is almost always present,) form a 
crowd of themselves ; and the moujiks run away for 
fear of being pressed to pump, and beaten if they do 
not pump hard enough. When there is a crowd, 
you may be certain that it is on the occasion of a 
national holiday, or a national tumult, — for this 
tightly reined-in country enjoys both occasionally. 
There are, you know, the Montagues Russes, the 
Ice Mountains of the New Year, the Blessing of 
the Neva's Waters ; the Katchelis and Shows of 
the Blinni Week, the eggs and kissings in all sorts 
of rings at Easter. At other times there are not 
even groups to stud the pavement of the enormous 
Perspectives and Ploschads ; and though you know 
St. Petersburg to have a population of three-quar- 
' ters of a million inhabitants, you might everywhere, 
save in the Gostinnoi-dvors, (where there is «io 
crowd, but a continuous stream of human beings 
of all classes,) fancy yourself in a howling desert. I 
had a balcony once on the Nevskoi, and could, with 
my blind man's holiday eyes, see from the Anitch- 
koff Bridge to the Admiralty clock spire, (of course 
with the aid of a good opera-glass,) which is at least 
a third of the length of that unrivalled street* I 
have seen it, between three and four o'clock in the 
afternoon, what one might call — vehicles, horses, 
and a few regiments of cavalry and infantry march- 
ing past, being taken into consideration — thronged ; 
sable-spotted as a turnpike road in England might 



TCHORNI NAROD : (THE BLACK PEOPLE.) 423 

be by half-a-dozen anthills slowly disgorging them- 
selves thereon, (this was exactly the position, so 
high was my balcony, so vast and far extended the 
sweep of vista :) but I never saw a crowd collected 
on roadway or foot-pavement, that could equal in 
a tithe of numerical denseness, the gathering one 
sees every day on a Paris boulevard round a cap- 
tured pickpocket, or the man in the helmet who 
sells the lead-pencils to the music of a barrel-organ 
fixed on to the 'top of his carriage, or the industrial 
in a blouse, who cuts (on his knees) a pane of glass 
into fragments with a diamond of dubious water, 
the original (of course) of which he afterwards sells 
you for the small sum of one sou ; or that can come 
up to the assemblage to be brought together twelve 
hundred times every day in Fleet Street or the 
Strand, by Punch, or a horse falling down. 

So rare are crowds in this teeming city, that even 
the public infliction of the Knout (which, to the 
honour of the Russians, is rarer still of occurrence) 
fails to bring the Tchorni-Narod together ; and, 
when a murderer or a brigand is knouted, the 
attendance of a certain number of the Black peo- 
ple is made compulsory. I am not going to describe 
the knout or the process of its infliction ; and I don't 
think I have mentioned it, as yet, by name, half-a- 
dozen times in the course of these papers. I never 
saw it, or the knout-masters, or the miserable wretch 
who had had it. I wish to say here, however, that 
this knout is really another Great Russian Boguey, 
— not to the Russians, who know all about it, but to 
us Western Europeans. There is scarcely a book, 



424 • A JOURNEY DUE NOETH. 

of travels you can open — English, French, or Ger- 
man, without a chapter bearing this special heading, 
the Knout, and in nine cases out of ten the de- 
scription of the punishment is taken from the old 
wonderful magazine account of Madame Lapouk- 
hin, who suffered in the reign of the Empress Anne 
Elizabeth ; or from some of the Faubourg St. Denis 
travels of the vivacious author of the Mysteres de 
la Russie. The Russians use the stick, the whip, 
and the rod, freely enough, Heaven knows ; but the 
extreme agony of the knout, they are exceedingly 
chary in having recourse to. There was not one 
criminal knouted during my stay — at least, in the 
capitals, (for the imminence of the ultimo ratio is 
always made public a week before hand, in all the 
newspapers,) though I daresay some dozens, males 
and females, were daily beaten, cruelly but not 
dangerously, in the police-yards. The infliction of 
the knout in cases of murder (brigands and female 
criminals, who, the latter, only receive from five to 
twenty strokes, are allowed to survive,) amount- 
ing to one hundred and fifty lashes of that terrible 
instrument, is almost always fatal ; indeed I have 
often heard Russians, whose humane dispositions I 
have had no reason to doubt, say that the police- 
surgeons had, generally, instructions not to attempt 
to cure the criminals after their torture. It is not 
the actual knout that kills, but the gangrene that 
supervenes in the neglected wounds. The old trav- 
eller's assertion that a skilful executioner can kill his 
patient with three strokes of the knout, is, if surgical 
authority be of any value, a pure fable. In any 



TCHORNI NAI^OD : (tHB BLACK PEOPLE.) 425 

case, I am enabled to state my conviction that the 
Russian knout kills fewer criminals for capital 
offences in two ye^ars than we hang in one. 

Crowds at such executions are, therefore, rare. 
Even the gathering together of two or three in no 
name save that of tyranny is an infrequent occur- 
rence : though the Czar, in the summer, can have 
his crowd, and does have it, to the amount of some 
hundred and fifteen thousand men to be reviewed 
on the Czarinski Loug, or Champ de Mars, — a 
square, compact crowd of men, good enough to fill 
a pit, who shout from their one hundred and fifteen 
thousand throstles, " We thank you. Father," as one 
man, or rather one machine, when the Czar gra- 
ciously says : " Good morning, my children ; " and 
shout again : " We hope to do better next time ! " 
when, if the evolutions have been satisfactory, his 
majesty says, " Well done, my children I " who, in 
cavalry charge in one pulk, to use Cossack parlance, 
— in one plump of spears, to use chivalric phrase- 
ology, to the number of fifty thousand, and sweep, 
pricking fast as a Simoon from the Sommer- Garten 
to the grim marble palace where the " frank, open- 
hearted sailor," the Grand Duke Constantine lives. 
So notable a thing is a mob, that the few there have 
, been, have become historical, and are remembered 
like battles, or pestilences, or famines, or comets. 
Old men whisper low, Aow, of the great silent crowd 
of Black People that gathered round the old Winter 
Palace one morning at the commencement of the 
present century ; when it began to be not noised — 
not bruited, but sinuously trailed about in move- 



426 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

ments of fingers, by glanceless eyes, by voiceless 
opening and shutting of telegraphic lips — ^that a 
dreadful deed had been done during the night by 
the great Boyards ; that the mad Czar was dead, 
and that Alexander Pavlovitch reigned in his stead. 
Most reverend seigneurs — potent and grave like- 
wise — you have entertained at your boards, you have 
sat at council with, you, most beauteous ladies, you 
have waltzed and flirted with, and have had your slen- 
der waists encircled by the kid-gloved hands of, and 
have accepted bouquets and ices from — not the sons 
or the grandsons of, but the very men who were 
guests among those bloody sixty who supped at a 
house in the Pourschlatskaia Oulitza on the twenty- 
third of March, eighteen hundred and one, who 
formed part of the band of murderers who, under 
the guidance of Platon ZoubofT and Pahlen and 
Benningsen, maddened with hatred and drunk with 
champagne, rushed after the orgies were over to the 
Winter Palace on the canal, and took the Czar, 
naked and a-bed, and slew him.* They say that 
Alexander the First never recovered from the first 
fit of (I hope not guilty) horror into which he was 
thrown by the deed he profited so largely by ; that 
the triumphs of the Borodino and the Beresina, the 
splendours of Erfurt and Tilsit, the witticisms of • 
Madame de Stael, the patronage of the first gentle- 
man (and we hope the last gentleman of that pat- 
tern) in Europe, including as that patronage did a 
Guildhall banquet, the pencil of Sir Thomas Law- 
rence, the Temple of Concord on the Serpentine, 
and Sir William Congreve's fireworks — nay, not 



TCHORNI NAROD: (THE BLACK PEOPLE.) 427 

these nor the invocations of Madame Krudener 
could ever efface from his mind the memory of that 
night of abominations. They say that on his doubt- 
ful bed of death at Taganrog he writhed with more 
than pain, and continually moaned: " Oh! c'est 
epouvantahle ! c'est epouvantahle ! " and then, after a 
lapse, " Empereur ! " The gentlewoman was not by 
as in the tragedy, but the physician was ; and he 
knew his patient was suffering from ills that physic 
could not cure. The lord of sixty million souls was 
haunted by the remembrance of that night. He saw 
in imagination the bed-room ; the conspirators reel- 
ing in ; the Czar in his shirt, hiding behind a screen ; 
the incoherent torrent of adjurations and menaces 
in French and Russ ; and then the dreadful knock- 
ing at the outer door ; the fear of rescue (though, 
indeed, it was but another band of conspirators 
arriving) ; the overturn of the lamp, and the end of 
that monarch. I say, seigneurs and ladies, you have 
walked and talked with some of those who supped 
and killed afterwards. They are very old, white- 
headed men now, high in office, decorated from the 
nave to the chaps, great diplomatists, adepts in state- 
craft ; but there was a time* when they were dashing 
young officers in the guards, and they saw in reality 
•that which Alexander saw only in imagination. 
They could teU you whether it was Platon ZoubofF 
or Count Pahlen who smashed Paul's skull in, with 
the hilt of his sword ; they could tell you whether it 
was Pahlen or Benningsen who knelt on the Czar's 
breast, and put him out of his misery by strangling 
him with an embroidered scarf. I wonder whether 



428 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the survivors of that scene ever think of the 
matter at all ! Whether at congress table, or court 
ball, or civic banquet, in' opera-box, or silk-lined car- 
riage, or actresses' boudoir, they ever think of the 
overturned lamp, the sword-hilt, and the scarf. Does 
the Avenger of Blood pursue them ? does Atra Cura, 
the black horseman, ride behind them ? Or do they 
look at the twenty-third of March, eighteen hundred 
and one, as a mere boyish freak — a peck of wild 
oats which they have sown profitably, and reaped 
abundant crops of protocols and paraphes, stars, 
crosses, and titles from ? 

Haud obliviscendum, indeed ! Life would be im- 
possible without a shower-bath of the waters of 
Lethe every quarter of a century or so ; without the 
sponge being applied when the slate is too full, and 
the tub of whitewash being brought in when the 
schedule has swelled too grossly. This man, I know, 
forged when he was twenty — rector's church-warden 
now. This, stole a goose, and was whipped for the 
theft, somewhere in the West Indies — high up in the 
Wooden-Spoon Referendaries Office now. This, 
robbed his father, deserted his children, broke his 
own wife's heart, and ran away with another man's 
— knighted last week. This, was the most covetous 
hunks, the hardest-hearted usurer, the unjustest. 
steward that money-bags have been clutched by 
since Harpagon or Hopkins — he is dead. The Rev- 
erend Hango Head, M. A., is writing a Latin epi- 
taph for him, and his disconsolate widow has ordered 
a memorial window, setting forth his virtues (in pre- 
Raphaelitically painted glass) in the chancel of 



TOHORNi narod: (the black people.) 429 

Saint Jonathan and Saint Gyves Great Wilderton 
Ciiurch. 

Once again the Black People met, silently and 
timorously to learn that they had changed masters, 
when, in eighteen hundred and twenty-six the news 
arrived of Alexander's death, and the cruel Constan- 
tine abdicated, and the Czar who was to do so much 
and so little for good and evil, for the glory and the 
shame of Russia, had to sieze his diadem, perforce 
with ensanguined hands, and wrap a gory shroud 
round his imperial purple. As before, the Black 
People had neither act nor part in the events of 
which they were frightened spectators. Constan- 
tine or Nicholas, it was not one salted cucumber, 
one copeck's worth of black bread, one keaker of 
quass, the more to them. The boyards alone were 
to change masters ; and they were to be the slaves 
of slaves for ever and ever. The real crowd was 
one of soldiery, who fought regiment against regi- 
ment, some for Nicholas, some for Constantine ; 
some for a cloudy myth of a constitution and a re- 
public their leaders had got, heaven knows how, 
into their muddled heads — perhaps while in garrison 
in some German town among moon-struck illumin- 
ati in eighteen hundred a^nd thirteen ; some for they 
knew not what, — for a fancied millennium, perhaps, 
of more vodki, and the stick being broken and cast 
into the pit for a thousand years. They fought in 
the Great Admiralty Square till the crisp snow was 
patched with crimson pools, and the cavalry horses, 
dabbling in them, pimpled the expanse with their 
hoof-nails for hundreds of yards around. So, as all 



430 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

men know, General Miloradovitch was slain ; the 
cannon began to thunder ; the Czar Nicholas came 
to his own ; Pestel and ^he others were hanged ; 
princes and counts and generals went in chains to 
Siberia; and the Tchorni-Narod, having stripped 
the corses of the slain lying on the now russet snow 
on the Admiralteskaia Ploschad, went to sell the 
old clothes and trinkets in the Tolkoutchji-Rinok 
(Great Elbow Market), and then to their several 
avocations of droschky driving and quass selling, 
and hewing the wood, and drawij;ig the water. 

There was to come a time though, when, for once 
in their oppressed lives, the Black People were to 
make a public appearance as a Mob, tumultuous, 
ferocious, and dangerous. The crowd of the mou- 
jiks in the Sinnaia or Hay market of St. Petersburg, 
is the one historical crowd in which the people were 
actors and not looking on. This was in the first 
year of Asiatic cholera declaring itself en perma- 
nence at St. Petersburg. It is now domiciled there 
en permanence^ and the Tchorni-Narod are as accus- 
tomed to it as to dirt, or to vermin, or to the stick. 
The Government had very praiseworthily taken the 
best sanitary precautions for the prevention of, and 
had adopted the most accsredited remedies for the 
cure of, this awful malady. It seemed like a stern 
measure of retribution meted out to the wicked 
rulers of an oppressed people, that where they were 
really endeavouring to do good the Tchorni-Narod 
rebelled against it. They could swallow the camel 
of tyranny — they strained at the gnat of benevolence. 
The Government had sown in ignorance ; they 



TCHORNi narod: (the black people.) 431 

reaped in revolt. The great hospitals of Oubouk- 
hofF and Kalinkine had both been placed under the 
superintendence of German physicians, who exerted 
themselves to the utmost to treat successfully the 
almost innumerable cases of cholera that were daily 
brought in. 

The average number of cholera cases in St. Peters- 
burg alone, in the sfimmer last past, was, according 
to the Gazette de 1' Academic, (as reliable a Russian 
document as, I believe, can well be found,) three 
hundred and ten per diem. Of the average in Mos- 
cow I have no information. The vast majority of 
these cases were among the Tchorni-Narod, and 
were fatal. This can easily be understood, if we 
remember the diet and positively Nomad habits of 
the masses in Holy Russia. The Ichvostchiks fre- 
quently sleep on their droschky benches, in the open 
air, exposed to every fluctuation of the always fluc- 
tuating weather. The dvorniks or yardmen always 
sleep alfresco.^ wrapped in their sheepskin touloupes 
or pelisses. The mechanics and labourers who come 
into St. Petersburg, for the summer months, from 
the outlying provinces of Carella and Ingria, sleep 
also a la belle etoile, wherever the most convenient 
scaffolding or mortar-heap can be found ; and there 
are thousands of the Black People who sleep where- 
soever, and under whatever circumstances, they can. 
The Russians, who are so studiously looked after by 
the police, to the minutest shade of passports and 
police, are perhaps the people in Christendom who 
habitually, and to the greatest extent, possess the 
key of the street. When, in addition to this, it is 



432 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

borne in mind that the Russian moujik scarcely ever 
tastes meat, and that his ordinary food is salted 
cucumber, black bread, and quass, the prevalence of 
cholera in St. Petersburg will be easily accounted 
for. 

The people, in their miserable ignorance of right 
and wrong, caught hold of an idea. This idea was 
no doubt industriously disseminated among them in 
the first instance by agents of that secret democratic 
and socialist party which — Siberia, the mines. Count 
Orloff 's cabinet and its scourgings, exile, confisca- 
tion, fortress-dungeons and espionage notwithstand- 
ing — existed occult, indomitable, and active as Bal- 
zac's Treize has always continued to exist in Russia 
from the time of the first French Revolution. The 
idea was that the moujiks, their brethren, were be- 
ing systematically poisoned by the German doctors, 
and by express direction of the Government. For 
once Ivan Ivanovitch forgot that the Czar was his 
father, his pastor and master, his guide, philosopher, 
and friend, and Heaven's vicegerent upon earth. 
An analogous report of the wells having been pois- 
oned was, it will be remembered, current among the 
populace in Paris in the first year of the cholera's 
visitation, and several emeutes took place; nor in 
England, in eighteen thirty-two, were there wanting 
alarmists of the Mrs. Grundy school, to ascribe the 
pestilence — on the one side to the machinations of 
the disappointed boroughmongers ; on the other to 
the malevolence of Levellers, Radicals, and Trades- 
union men. Ivan forgot the power of the police 
and his own helplessness. He and his comrades in 



TCHORNI NAROD : (THB BLACK PEOPLE.) 433 

thousands stormed the hospitals, massacred the doc- 
tors and their assistants under circumstances of the 
most shocking brutality, threw the beds and bedding 
out of the windows, carried off the patients, (to die, 
poor wretches, in carts and cellars, and under vege- 
table-stalls and horse-troughs ;) and then, like a mob 
of schoolboys who have screwed up their courage to 
pelt an unpopular usher, and who afterwards with 
outward words of boasting and rebellion, but with 
an inward sinking of their hearts into their high-lows, 
bar themselves into the school-room, defying the 
masters, but knowing full well that authority will 
get the best of it, and that Birnam Wood will be 
brought to Dunsinane, for brooms to thrash them 
with ; — the Ivan did his barring out. All cowering 
and wondering that he could have been so bold in 
the Sennai'a; entrenching himself behind trusses of 
hay and piles of fruit and vegetables — ^beneath the 
bulks of butchers' stalls and among crates of crockery, 
(for they sell all things in the Hay market ;) armed 
with such rude instruments of defence as hatchets, 
and straightened scythes attached to poles, and the 
great three-pronged forks with which the bread is 
drawn from the peetch, or stove; he awaited the 
coming of the troops. 

I have no doubt, that had the soldiery really 
arrived and set to work, the moujiks would have 
suffered the most violent cannonade and musket 
practice, without attempting to move until they 
were routed out by the bayonet. Their energy was 
over ; their rebellion was, thenceforth, inert and pas- 
sive. But the Czar Nicholas knew too well the 

19 



434 A JOURNEY DUB NORTH. 

temperament of his children to send against them or 
horse, or foot, or artillery. To cowhide your slave : 
good; but to destroy valuable property by taking 
your slave's life, none but a foolish slaveholder 
would do that. It is an old story, but worth the 
telling again, that Nicholas, unattended by escort, 
or aide-de-camp, or groom, was driven in his single 
droschky, with the one single Ischvostchik before 
him to drive him to the place of the revolt. That, 
arrived on the Sennai'a, he quickly alighted, and, 
wrapped in his gray coat, and helmed and plumed, 
stalked through the masses of rebellious thousands, 
(who made an astonished vaccillating lane for him 
to pass,) towards the church with the four copolas, 
and the dome with the silver stars, that stands in 
the right hand upper extremity of the Haymarket. 
That, ascending the marble stairs of that fane, he 
prostrated himself before the image of the saint 
that stood in the porch ; and then suddenly turned 
round to the gazing masses, and, extending his right 
hand, cried out, with the full strength of his mag- 
nificent voice, " People, on your knees ! " That the 
thousands, as one, knelt down and bowed their fore- 
heads to the dust ; that the Czar then pronounced a 
short allocution to them, bidding them ask pardon 
for their sins, telling them how wicked they were ; 
how good he was ; that, while he was speaking, 
some cat-like police agents glided in among the 
people and took, without a shadow of resistance, 
some hundreds of prisoners, who were noiselessly 
removed to suffer the Pleidi, or the Battogues, and 
to be afterwards sent to Siberia ; — and that the trick 



TCHORNI NAUOD : (tHE BLACK PEOPLE.) 435 

was done. Yet I have heard, in Russia, Russians 
say that the Czar Nicholas, like Sir Robert Peel — 
THE Sir Robert Peel, I mean — was so constitution- 
ally timorous, that a spaniel yapping about his heels, 
or a monkey leaping on to his shoulder, was suffi- 
cient to thow him into an agony of terror. To my 
mind, the artilleryman, who, meeting the Bengal 
tiger, stooped down and looked at that beast from 
between his legs, so that the terrible tiger, not know- 
ing what on earth the strange animal gazing at him 
could be, howled in affright, took to his paws, and 
enjungled himself in the rattle of a snake's tail, was 
the only compeer I have ever heard of, worthy to 
rank, for real courage and presence of mind, with 
him who bade the people who had massacred the 
doctors fall on their knees ; and was obeyed. 

The Tchorni-Narod can assert their individuality 
sometimes, therefore ; but, it is only transiently and 
spasmodically; and the fit is followed by pitiable 
reaction. It has been before observed, that an en- 
raged sheep is for the moment nearly as troublesome 
a customer to deal with as a roaring lion. Almost 
always the Russian peasant takes his thrashing, and 
general ill-treatment, quietly : nay, will thank his 
corrector, and kiss the rod. He will not cry out : 
" How long, O Lord ! How long ? " but will bear 
(as a rule) his to us intolerable miseries, as long as 
that miserable life of his endures. But times will 
come when the sheep goes furious. He has the gids 
— ^to speak as a shepherd. Then he rages ; then he 
storms; then he whirls round; then he butts forward 
in a momentarily potent frenzy ; and then woe be- 



436 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

tide Bourmister and Starosta — commander of pun- 
ishment and executant of punishment: woe betide 
even the noble Boyard; for Ivan Ivanovitch will 
rend him asunder, and spare not his noble wife nor 
his noble daughters, nor the very children that are 
unborn : and after this come speedily, reaction, and 
repentance, and a dreadful retribution on the part of 
outraged authority. 

As I have pointed out, a riotous crowd — a crowd, 
indeed, at all in St. Petersburg or Moscow, is a nov- 
elty and an event to be remembered, and made a 
thing historical of — will my reader ask any Russian 
acquaintance to relate a few anecdotes of the peas- 
ant crowds, who, from time to time, gather them- 
selves together down south — towards the east, or in 
the far west of the gigantic empire — ^in governments 
you never heard of, in provinces you never dreamed 
of? You shall hear how some delicate countess 
who has been the belle, not only of the salons of the 
northern capital, but of Paris, and London, and Vi- 
enna ; who has retired, after some love-pique against 
a charge-d'-affaires^ or some scandal with her hus- 
band, to her vast estates, hundreds of versts beyond 
Moscow, and has there devoted herself to the task 
of torturing her slaves ; has invented and practised 
such unheard-of cruelties upon hef bower-maidens 
and her wretchedest dependents, down to her cooks 
and scullions, that some direful evening there has 
been a crowd; that the crowd have poured boiling 
oil on her, and have hung her up by the hair of her 
head, while they have scarified her by drawing in- 
fmiated cats over her; that they have plucked out 



TCHORNI NAROD : (THE BLACK PEOPLE.) 437 

her nails and her eyes, and singed her before a slow 
fire, and finally have hacked her to pieces with 
hatchets, and eaten her brains.* That after the 
frightful retaliation had been committed came a re- 
action, and terror, and abject cringing. The general 
commanding the provincial government came down ; 
there was a reign of terror ; many were beaten to 
death : more had their nostrils torn out, and were 
sent to Siberia, there to work in the mines and in 
chains, as slaves, for life. 

You don't see these narratives in the Journal de 
St. Petersbourg, or in the Abeille du Nord, or in the 
Invalide Russ, among the catalogue of recent pro- 
motion in the illustrious orders of St. Anne, St. 
Wladimir, and St. Alexander Nevskoi, or among the 
official despatches announcing new victories over 
the Circassians. They do occur though, from time 
to time. The government keep them dark : and you 
hear them after dark and subtle whispers, as " cette 
chose terrible qui est arrive dernieremenV — ^that ter- 
rible event in the government of Orel, or KharkofF, 
or TambofF, which has happened lately, and which 
is so very regretable ; — but which will happen again 
and again, I opine, as long as the Tchorni-Narod, 
the Black People of Russia, are ground down and 
oppressed, as th*ey are in this present era of grace. 

* At Bagatoi, In the government of Kowrsk, in eighteen hun- 
dred and fifty-four. 



438 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 



XX. 

THE IKS. 

The title of this paper may seem excedingly absurd. 
But there are many Iks and Chiks and Niks in Russ- 
land, whom it behoves to have information about. 

In the Nevskoi — ^the great avenue of the Tents 
of Kedar I am so strangely constrained to dwell 
amongst and in its immediate ducts, the Great and 
Little Morskaias — you will see panorama-passing 
during the day, aU the Iks worth noticing. In these 
streets only will you be able to view any thing ap- 
proaching to the Johnsonian or Fleet Street aspect 
of City Life. Away from the Nevskoi and the 
Morskaias, the vast streets of Petersburg are, at all 
seasons, little better than deserts. Solitary figures 
of slaves and soldiers glide by occasionally, ghost- 
like ; but, on Quay or Esplanade, in Oulitza, Per- 
spective, Ploschad, or Pereoulok, there is (as I have 
hinted in the Tchorni-Narod) nor throng nor pres- 
sure — and I have seen, at high-noon, standing in the 
centre of the Admiralty Square, one dog ; a mangy 
cur with a ridiculous tail — who, in fhe insolence of 
undisputed possession, set his four paws all wide 
apart, and wagging that truncated handle of his, 
barked shrilly and scornfully at the high palaces, as 
though they had been the walls of Balclutha, and 
he was delighted that they were desolate. 

Very slowly, but with crustaceous tenacity, has 



THE IKS. 439 

the Nevskoi in its ways, its inns and outs, and its 
Iks, fixed itself upon me. It was shy and coy at 
first. Let me, as briefly as I may, essay to go round 
the clock with you on the Nevskoi, and trot out the 
Iks, in their morning as well as evening aspects. 
Remember, this is summer-time ; the beginning of 
July ; (for I know nothing of Acris Hyems in Rus- 
sia ;) and take note, if you please, that the time is 
four o'clock in the morning. 

I am not at all ashamed to say that I have been 
out all night — at least all the time usually set apart 
in civilized countries for that appalling season of 
existence — at a ball, and that I am rattling home 
behind an Ischvostchik from the seventeenth line at 
Wassily-Ostrow; and, though wrapped in a thick 
overcoat, shivering with cold. The sun is manifest 
enough and bright enough in all conscience, and the 
smiling morn (smiling a polite, heartless, soulless, 
Sheffield plate, thoroughly Muscovite smile) is busily 
employed in tipping the gaudy domes with a brighter 
lustre than their gold leaf gives them. Not a shop, 
above ground, is open as yet — the aristocratic Bou- 
tiquiers of the Nevskoi are as late risers as their 
customers — but, in the basement, there are plenty of 
small " Lavkas " — grocery, chandlery, and bakery 
shops open ; to* say nought of the vodki-dens with 
the great bunches of grapes in gold leaf suspended 
over their portals, to show, I presume, that wine is 
not sold there — which dram establishments never 
seem to be closed at all. The water-carts go heavily 
lumbering past ; then I hear a clanking as of many 
tin-pots, or of marrowbone and cleaver music, in 



440 A JOUENEY DUE NORTH. 

which the metal unduly preponderates ; and see ad- 
vancing towards me a gaunt, bony, ill-favoured 
woman in a striped petticoat held up by the usual 
braces, the usual full-sleeved innermost garments, a 
crimson handkerchief tied over her freckled face, and 
streaming behind, like a Bedouin's burnouse when 
the capuchin is thrown suddenly back from the head. 
Over each shoulder she" carries a heavy arc of wood, 
like a fully bent bow, but hollowed out in the centre 
so as to fit her shoulder, and serve as a yoke ; to 
either end of which are suspended fasciculi of the 
before-mentioned tin-pots, much battered, and with 
brazen lids and spouts. This is a milk-woman. 
She does not deliver the caseous beverage from 
house to house, as with us, but takes her stand at 
some patented spot — generally at the " Auge " or 
feeding-trough of a droschky-stand. There are no 
such things as nosebags in the cabbicular hierarchy 
in this country ; and, by a most humane provision, 
the animals are rendered independent of the caprice, 
or cruelty, or stinginess of their drivers, and are fed 
under police superintendence at the public auges or 
troughs, to whose support all the Ischvostchiks con- 
tribute their quota at stated times and in abundance. 
She either stands at one of these or close to the 
cabane or wooden hut of a Boutotsnik. Hither 
come either the dvorniks (yardmen), or the slough 
(man-servants), or the sloujanka (maid-servants), to 
lay in a stock of milk for the day. What the 
Petersburgers, who are not Tartars (for these live 
almost entirely upon milk) can want with milk, I 
am puzzled to discover. They almost uniformly 



THE IKS. 441 

drink black coffee after dinner, and seldom indulge 
in that beverage for breakfast (the rich prefer cham- 
pagne and Lafitte ; the poor, quass or vodki) ; they 
drink their tea without milk in ninety-nine cases out 
of a hundred ; I never saw any remarkable profusion 
or custards or ice-creams at Russian dinner-tables ; 
and it is my firm impression that there are no chil- 
dren in St. Petersburg to drink it. There are little 
men and women, little cadets, little grand-dukes, 
small Tchinovniks, miniature policemen, Lilliputian 
admirals, infinitesimal Archimandrites and Proto- 
popes, minified countesses, minute coquettes ; dia- 
mond, ruby, and pearl editions of that Book which 
will be Reviewed some day; but, of bouncing, 
bawling, buoyant, bothering, delightful children, 
there are none to be found here. It makes one 
shudder here to see the small tots of humanity, who 
only knew your ankles yesterday, and are scarcely 
tall enough to be on speaking terms with your knee- 
caps even now, conversing gravely in two or three 
languages, and bowing, and scraping, and lifting 
their caps, and unbuckling their sword-belts, as 
though, good Lord! as though they had been 
bandied about, and worn, and punched, and bitten, 
as often as a George the Third sixpence, instead of 
being silver pennies, bright, sharp, fresh, new from 
Nature's mint. The babies here, too — ^the very 
babies in arms — frown sternly on you as they pass 
by, or solve mathematical problems on their nurses 
arms, with their limp tiny fingers, biting their lips 
thoughtfully the while.* These precocious civil and 

* Whenever I go into a strange country I set myself sedulously 

19* 



442 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

military functionaries, incipient diplomatists, sprout- 
ing philosophers, conquerors — what need have they 
of a milk diet ? Babies though they be, they re- 
quire strong meat. Give them their bird, let them 
crack their bottle, light their pipes, lace them the 
tightest of corsets, hand them the daintiest of fans, 
for they are grown up, before they are grown at all. 

to work to discover (and this you may perhaps have already in- 
ferred) something like a national and picturesque costume. Gen- 
erally I am disappointed, and find nothing but prosaic hats and 
coats, bonnets and shawls, black cotton stockings, and linsey 
woolsey petticoats. I experienced great delight, however, and 
thought I had at last found a land of handsome dresses, when, 
walking the streets during my nonage in Petersburg, I lighted 
upon divers females, generally ruddy, comely often, and clad in 
the same description of gala costume I have attempted to describe 
in the holiday dress of the " Baba." The most plainly attired 
had sarafannes or tunics of crimson silk edged with broad gold 
lace, embroidered shoes, petticoats of rich stuff, necklaces, mas- 
sive gold earings, and kakoschniks glistening with sham jewels 
and seed-pearls. They invariably had small Russians with them, 
either in arms or toddling by their sides ; and I conjectured them 
to be wives of wealthy native merchants ; but I was very soon 
afterwards, and to my extreme disappointment, informed that 
they were Wet-nurses ; and that this masquerade costume was 
worn by them as a matter of course, and with as little pieturesque 
truth as John Thomas wears the maroon plush and chrome yellow 
aiguillettes of the Countess of Squllpington. These wet-nurses 
are usually from Southern Russia. (They say no babies can live 
that are nursed by women from the marshy government of St. 
Petersburg.) Not one in five hundred of them is mariied. They 
have a child, and cast it into the Foundling Hospital, get a cer- 
tificate of health from a doctor, and become wet-nurses in noble 
families. It is a profession. It is a paying one. A discontented 
Sloujanka (if she be not a serf) will say, " This does not suit me ; 
I cannot support the Barynia. I shall go and be a wet-nurse." 



THE IKS. 443 

Whoever drinks the milk, there are plenty of 
Laitieres and Cremieres in the capital. They have 
a quarter to themselves too, not exactly in St. Peters- 
burg, but on the other side of the watei*, in the vil- 
lage of Okhta, where they dwell among their pots 
and keep their cows. The Petersburg milk-women 
are, I believe, mainly the property of that colossal 
slave proprietor (he has a hundred thousand they 
say) Count TcheremetiefF. Such cows, too, the 
milk- women have ! You may frequently see them 
being led about the streets, gaunt, bony, woebe- 
gone little brutes, and I declare not one whit bigger 
than Shetland ponies ; or perhaps, indeed, Shetland 
cows, if the cattle of the Ultima Thule are as 
diminutive as their horses. It is only very early in 
the morning that cattle or sheep are seen about the 
streets ; they are then mostly on their way to Was- 
sily-Ostrow, where are the slaughter-houses and the 
majority of the summer butcher's shops. I see, still 
rattling along in this early-late droschky of mine, 
(the Ischvostchik has not, probably, been to bed for 
a week, but is considerably fresher than I am,) mul- 
titudes of horned beasts and sheep, yet for all their 
numbers, only speckling the vastness of the Open, 
coming adown the great street from the Smolnoi* 
road, along the quays, across the Pont-Neuf or Noyi- 
Most, and so on to their doom to be made meat of. 
The sheep, albeit somewhat longer- wo oiled, are much 
like ours ; they are not ruddled, but appear to be 
branded with a curious cross within a circle, and a 
distinguishing letter, on the left flank. I wonder 
they don't stamp them with the double eagle ! The 



444 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

pigs are truculent, evil-eyed animals enough, with 
gashed snouts and switch tails. Observing the re- 
markable bright russet hue of some of these porcine 
Russians, I can for once acknowledge as a truth that 
legend of the " Red Pig," which in my skepticism I 
had hitherto been led to rank, as fabulous, with Guy 
Earl of Warwick's Dun Cow, and More of More 
Hall's Wantley Dragon. The sheep (in Russia) are 
driven by moujiks, clothed in toulopes or loose 
leathern coats, which, with an utter disregard of 
delicacy and consideration for the feelings of the 
animals themselves, are evidently made of sheepskin. 
Their legs — the moujiks', I mean — are swathed in 
criss-cross bandages of leather or bark, much resem- 
bling the cruciform-leggings worn by Mr. James 
"Wallack in the melo-drancia of the brigand. These 
Corydons wield the instrument we so often read 
about, and so seldom see, the real shepherd's crook 
— not the long pole with a squeezed-up hook, which 
the Sussex pastors carry, but exactly resembling 
a bishop's crozier. The shepherds have no collies — 
no dogs to worry the sheep, or keep them together ; 
their crook serves them for all in all ; and they pos- 
sess a peculiar agility in intertwining the hook with 
the woolly locks of the sheep's fleece, and then, 
dexterously reversing the instrument, driving the 
end of the staff (sharpened and shod with iron) into 
his ribs in a manner calculated to cause great agony 
to the mutton, but highly conducive to discipline 
and good order. The pig-drivers have Cossack 
whips, with thongs about six times as large as the 
staff, with a little perforated ball of lead, strung, 



THE IKS. 445 

which runs up and down the lash, so that the pig is 
sure to have it somewhere. This whip makes, when 
cracked, a tremendous noise ; and from the expres- 
sion I have observed on the baconian physiognomy, 
I don't think that animal likes it. Finally, the cat- 
tle drivers, clad (also in seeming insult to their vic- 
tims) in loose capes of pie-bald calf-skin, as if they 
had been foraging in the Pantechnicon, London, 
and had robbed some hair -trunks of their coverings. 
They blow veritable cow-horns, which make an un- 
earthly wailing noise, and sound so discordantly that 
I very much marvel that the cows don't die of that 
tune. 

Over the glassy Neva, blue as the sky that roofs 
it, with ships from all parts of the world mirroring 
their cobweb rigging in its depths, over the Neva 
by the new bridge on to the Quai Anglais, and I 
am not half home yet. See, here are the Iks all at 
once, and in great force all over the new bridge 
without crowding it, and stationary, though there is 
no show to see, no orator to hear, no time to laze 
away ; for they are all bound for a weary day's 
work. 

That man with a short, stunted, scrubby, but 
thick beard, with the leathern cap and blue cloth 
band in lieu of the ordinary Ischvostchik's hat ; with 
the blue-striped shirt, pink-striped breeches, and im- 
mutable boots, and fluttering over all like the toga 
of an ancient Roman in difficulties, or the time- 
worn, and by stern-creditor-not-renewed mantle of 
Don Caesar de Bazan — a tattered, patched, greasy, 
stained, villanous, but voluminous leathern apron — 



446 A JOURNEY DTJE NORTH. 

is a Batchmatchnik, a shoemaker. He beside him, 
with the cunning fox-face, the unwholesome com- 
plexion, the bloodshot eyes, the slight stoop in the 
back, the large hands with lissom fingers crooked 
somewhat at the tips, the general weary, done-up, 
hunted-dog look, telling of late hours, and later 
vodki ; he who has a square bonnet of stiff blue 
paper something like a lancer's cap on his head, 
a black calico apron over his caftan, and black 
calico sleeves reaching half-way up his arms, must 
be a Typograpschtchik — a journeyman printer, who 
has just knocked off work at the bureaux of the 
Journal de St. Petersbourg in the Pochta-Oulitza, 
or General Post- Office-street hard by; or else he has 
been setting all night in type, positive or superlative 
lies in some imperial oukase, or edict, or prikaz. 
Yonder fellow, with the herculean frame, the fair- 
haired, blue-eyed, full-bearded, Richard- Coeur-de- 
Lion head, and the eye like Mars to threaten or 
command, (he was whipped yesterday,) is — it needs 
not his bared arm, his coarse canvas suit, but always 
with boots, the rope tied round his waist, and the 
tape round his forehead, and the film of fine drab 
powder with which he is covered from hair of crown 
to ball of toe — ^to tell you, a Kammenstchik, or 
stone-mason. Beside him is his brother in building 
— not an Ik this time, but an Ar ; but he may be 
allowed, I hope, to press in with the ruck — a ruddy 
fellow in a pink shirt and the usual etceteras, with 
a hatchet stuck in his girdle ; a merry-faced varlet, 
with white teeth, who, if he had but an ass to lead, 
might be Ali Baba; but who is his own beast of 



THE IKS. 447 

burden, wots of no caverns, and is simply Axinti 
IvanofF the Stoliar, or carpenter. He can do more 
feats of carpentry, joinery, ay, and cabinet-making 
and upholstery, with that single clumsily-made, 
blunt-looking toula hatchet of his, than many a 
skilled operative in London who earns his three 
pounds per week. Axinti, of course, is a slave ; 
and, being very clever at his trade, is at high obrok, 
and is very profitable to his master. The facility 
and dexterity with which the E-ussian mechanics 
handle the hatchet, and make it serve in lieu of 
other tools, are marvellous and almost incredible, 
are certainly unequalled, save by the analogous skill 
of the peasants of the Black Forest, who are re- 
ported to be able to cut down trees, square timber 
for houses, carve comic nutcrackers and ugly-mugged 
toys, shave themselves, and cut their meat, all with 
the aid of one single penknife. The hatchet of the 
Russian carpenter seems to serve him in lieu of 
plane, saw, chisel, and mallet, and (it would almost 
seem) gimlet and screwdriver. I knew a Russian 
who declared " quHl avait un paysanj'' (" T avals un 
paysan^^ — I had a peasant — is as common a com- 
mencement to a Russian conversation as " once 
upon a time " to a fairy tale, or " it is now some 
eighteen years since " to the speech of a virtuous 
venerable in a melo-drama at home) who could glue 
boards together with his hatchet. No men (I except 
the Batmen) who have traversed Moscow or Peters- 
burg streets, and have watched carpenters at work, 
either in their open shops or at the ligneus pave- 
ment, can have failed to remark the wonderful dex- 



448 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

terity with which they convert a rough, shapeless 
piece of wood, into a plank, a panel, an hexagonal 
paving-block, a staff, a batten, a fagot, a quoin, a 
board, or a shelf. The process seems instantaneous. 
The carpenters have other tools besides the hatchet, 
doubtless ; though I never saw a Russian Stoliar 
with a complete basket of tools beside him. But 
the hatchet is emphatically an implement germane 
and to the Russian manner born, as the cloth-yard' 
shaft was to the English bowmen of yore, before the 
long-bow came to be used in England in a manner 
that our stout ancestors of Crecy and Agincourt 
never dreamt of. With the hatchet, the Russian 
moujik hews at the black pine-forests of Olonetz 
and Wiborg, for logs for his houses, for timber for 
the Czar's ships ; with the hatchet he defends him- 
self against the grisly bear and ravenous wolf ; with 
the hatchet he cuts a way for his sledge in winter 
through the frozen snow ; with the hatchet he joints 
frozen meat, and cuts up frozen fish, and chops fro- 
zen vegetables. The hatchet is his principal aid in 
building his house, and in constructing his furniture, 
and in cutting his fuel ; all of which he does him- 
self. If your Kibitk, or Tarantasse, or Telega break 
down on the road, you holloa out at the full strength 
of your lungs for assistance ; whereupon a group of 
peasants presently appear, crying " Stichasse I " (di- 
rectly!) who mend your broken trace, or spring, or 
axle, or reshoe your near-wheeler, or heal your drunken 
yemstschik's broken head, with a hatchet ! — charging 
you many roubles for the accommodation. With a 
hatchet Peter the Great commenced the massacre of 



THE IKS. 449 

the Strelitzas ; with a hatchet some say he murdered 
his own son ; with a hatchet sometimes, even in 
these days of grace, the Russian moujik, maddened 
by drink and despair, rushes on the lord who has 
oppressed him, and with that murderous tool dashes 
out his brains. It puzzles me that the government 
should allow the slaves to carry these ugly-looking 
weapons constantly in their girdles. I shouldn't 
lil^e to offer my serf fifty blows with a stick when he 
had an axe in his belt. I wouldn't have minded 
trusting Uncle Tom with a bowie-knife ; but I 
should have kept my hatchets under lock and key if 
I had Sambo, or Quimbo, or Three-fingered Jack 
about my property. 

It is not only in the use of the hatchet that the 
Russian peasant displays extraordinary dexterity, 
and power of achieving great things, with appar- 
ently the most contemptible and inadequate means. 
There is a well-known anecdote, which I may be 
excused for repeating here, of a Russian peasant, 
named Telouchkine, who, some thirty years since, 
contracted, for the sum of eighty silver roubles, (the 
materials of course being found him,) to regild the 
spire, the crc)ss, and the angel surmounting it, of the 
cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul (the burial-place 
of the Czars, from Peter to Nicholas) in the fortress 
of Petersburg. He accomplished this gigantic task 
without the aid of any scaffolding or platform work 
whatsoever, simply sitting astride on a little saddle 
suspended by cords. The spire, from its base to the 
summit of the cross is sixty-five sagenes, or four hun- 
dred and fifty-five English feet in height (455) : the 



450 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

cross alone being eight sagenes or fifty-six feet high. 
I never heard the authenticity of this feat disputed. 
I have never heard what reward, beyond the eighty 
roubles contracted for, was bestowed on Telouch- 
kine. Perhaps, Jiis proprietor, as a compliment to 
his talents, increased his yearly obrok ; but I am 
afraid that when he died, he did not leave his secret 
to any one. When I left St. Petersburg, the angel 
and cross in the church in the fortress had fallen, as 
to gildings into a woful state of second-hand-look- 
ing dinginess. It had become again a question of 
regilding these ornaments ; but, this time, no Te- 
louchkine came forward with an eighty-rouble offer. 
A most elaborate scaffolding, whose symmetry of 
proportions seemed to me quite astonishing, had 
been erected round the spire for the use of the work- 
men. It had cost, I was told, a good many thou- 
sand roubles, and was to cost a good many thousand 
more, before even a book of gold-leaf could be ap- 
plied to cross, or angel, or spire. 

No man who knows these poor Hussian people 
with their rude tools, and hands seldom disciplined 
by regular apprenticeship, can doubt that it is faith 
that helps them along in such works as Telouch- 
kine accomplished. That strong and blind belief 
in the Czar and in the saints, in a material re- 
ward from St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Sergius or 
St. George, St. Wladimir or St. Nicholas, in the 
shape of heaven-sent roubles, or a dupe sent by the 
saints in their way to swindle, or a cash-box for 
them to steal, (without the possibility of detection,) 
or a miraculous softening of their masters' hearts, 



THE IKS. 451 

and their exemption from the stick for years ; to- 
gether with a certain hope and trust that for this 
good deed done to the saints and the Czar, they 
will be rewarded with a real golden crown, a real 
white robe, a real harp, a real cloud to sit upon, to 
all eternity, while the Barynn, the Starosta, and the 
Bourmister, go to the devil, to be beaten to pieces 
by Gospodin Schrapschin, (Lord Beelzebub,) and 
burnt to cinders by Gospodin Tchort (Lord Lucifer: 
the Russians are very polite to their devils,- and give 
them titles of honour.) This strong belief leads men 
like Telouchkine to swing four hundred feet high 
on six inches of wood hung to a hempen cord ; it 
led the moujiks who built up the Winter Palace in 
eleven months, and perished by thousands building 
it, to work cheerfully, patiently, enthusiastically, in 
the broiling sun and the icy blast, because it was 
the Gossudar, the Czar's house, and because the 
government had caused it to be given out, that the 
works had been blessed by an angel ; it led the 
gaunt gray-coated men in the flat caps to fight, and 
stand and march, and charge, and starve and die, 
uncomplainingly, unyieldingly, heroically, on the 
heights of Alma and in the valley of Inkermann, 
in casemates full of blood and smoke ; in hospitals, 
where the wounded could not lie for the dead that 
were a-top of them; on bone-covered steppes, in 
pestilential marshes; on muddy tongues of ooze, 
and weed, and treacherous sand, that skirt the Putrid 
Sea, 

Are not these all Iks ? — for what is the Soldatt, 
the soldier, but a shaven moujik ? — and have I been 



452 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

digressing? I know, though, these Iks are not those 
I left on the bridge. There is another Ik. Big beard, 
red face, but all the rest as white and floury, as the 
mason is gi'ay. This is a boulotchnik, or baker — a 
journeyman baker, mind; for were he a master, he 
would not be a Russian or a serf at all, but a free 
German. For a wonder, he is not booted, but wears 
a pair of coarse canvas trousers, and drab list slip- 
pers. You must not confound him with that bow- 
legged industrial, clad also from head to foot in 
white, but not floury, who is circulating restlessly 
among the Iks, and bears before him a fiat tray, or 
shallow basket, full of bread of the multiform shapes 
the Russians delight in — ^bread in long twisted rolls ; 
bread in double semicircles, hollow, like a pair of 
handcuffs ; bread in round balls, and bricks, and 
tablets, and big flat discs, and lumps of no particu- 
lar shape. Some of this seems white and light 
enough, almost cake or pufF-paste in appearance ; 
but the great mass is of the approved Rye or Pum- 
pernickel pattern ; and though appetisingly light in 
its rich brownness without, is, when cut, as dark as 
the skin of a mulatto. This Ik is a Xhlaibchik liter- 
ally Bread-man — if indeed Ik or Chik or Nik may 
be understood to mean man. Perhaps the Ik is only 
synonymous with our " er " in Costermonger, Fish- 
monger, Fruiterer, Poulterer. The Xhlaibchik is 
doing a smart trade on the bridge among the Ilis ; 
(whom I hope you have by this time discovered form 
part of the Tchorni-Narod, the Black people ;) for 
from four to five in the morning is breakfast time 
with them. Some other peripatetic tradesmen min 



THE IKS. 453 

ister to the co-epicurean wants of the Iks. There is 
the Tchaichik — the tea-man — who carries a glowing 
samovar beneath his arm wrapped in a thick cloth, 
from whose centre protrudes a long horizontal spout 
and tap. He also carries, by a strap over his shoul- 
der, a flat tray, covered with a fair linen cloth, on 
which is his array of tumblers, and earthen mugs, 
pewter spoons, lumps of sugar, (seldom called for,) 
and slices of lemon, much in demand. He serves 
his tea, all hot, as the merchant in the cab-rank 
centre of the Haymarket, London, does his potatoes. 
The tea is of the very coarsest, bitterest, and vilest 
of flavour. I tasted it, and it costs two copecks a 
tumbler. It is full of strange ingredients that float 
about in it, herbaceous, stony, gritty, and earthy; 
but it is not adulterated in Russia, being made from 
the cheap brick tea mixed with sheep's blood, as 
coffee with chicory — so called from the bricks or in- 
gots into which the leaf is compressed — brought by 
caravans out of China, by way of Kiatki. It is 
written that you must eat a peck of dirt before you 
die; and I think that about four tumblers of hot 
Petersburg street tea would go a long way towards 
making up the allowance. There is another Tchai- 
chik — the cold-tea-man. He with a prodigious vase 
of glass, with a pewter top, and through whose pel- 
lucid sides (the vase's) you can see the brown liquid 
frothing with much oscillation, and with much sliced 
lemon bobbing up and down in it, leans moodily 
against the parapet of the Novi-Most; for the morn- 
ing air is a nipping and an eager one, and the cry is, 
as yet, almost entirely for warm tea. Not so with 



454 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 

the Kolbasnik, or dealer in characuterie : — there is 
positively no strictly English word for it, but seller 
of " pork fixings " will explain what I mean. He is 
a blithe fellow with a good face and a shirt so bright 
that he looks like a Russian robin red-breast, and 
goes hopping about among the Iks, vaunting his 
wares, and rattling his copecks, till a most encourag- 
ing diminution begins to be apparent in his stock of 
sausages, pig's and neat's feet, dried tongue, hung 
beef, salted pork fat, (a great Kolbasnik delicacy, in 
lumps, and supplying the place of bacon, of whose 
existence the Russians seem unaware,) and balls 
of pork mincemeat, resembling the curious viands 
known in cheap pork butchery in England, I believe, 
as Faggots. 

There are, as yet, few women or children crossing 
the bridge ; and of those few the former are counter- 
parts of the Okhta milk-woman, without her yoke 
and bundle of tin cans. There pass, occasionally, 
silent files of soldiers, clad either in vile canvas 
blouses, or else in gray capotes gone to rags, whose 
military character is only to be divined by their 
shaven chins, and closely-cropped heads, and long 
moustaches. These are men drafted off from the 
different regiments not on actual duty, to work in 
the docks, at unloading ships at the custom-house ; 
or warehousing goods ; or at the private trades or 
occupations at which they may be skilled. They 
receive wages, which are said facetiously to go to- 
wards the formation of a regimental reserve fund ; 
but which in reality go to augment the modest 
emoluments of his excellency the general, or his 



THE IKS. 455 

high-born honour the major, or his distinguished 
origin the captain. 

The background of these groups is made up by 
the great Iks of all Iks, the Moujiks, the Rabotniks, 
(the generic term for workmen, as a Moujilt and 
Christian are for slaves,) the indefinable creatures in 
the caftans, who are the verb active of the living 
Russ condemned for their lifetime to be, to do, and 
to suffer. This is why they tarry on the bridge on 
their way to work — those multifarious Iks. There 
is a shrine-chapel at its foot towards Wassily-Os- 
trow : — a gilded place, with pictures, filagree railings, 
silver lamps suspended from chains, huge waxen 
candles continually burning, and steps of black mar- 
ble. Every Ik, every woman and child, every sol- 
dier, every Ischvostchik as he passes this shrine, 
removes his hat or cap, crosses himself, and bows 
low before it. Many bow down and worship it — 
literally grovelling in the dust; touching the earth 
repeatedly with their foreheads, kissing the marble 
steps and the feet of the saint's image, and looking 
devoutly upwards as though they longed to hug the 
great, tall, greasy wax candles. Not the poorest Ik 
but fumbles in his ragged caftan to see if he can 
find a copeck for the saint's money-boxes, which, 
nailed to the wall, guards the staircase like sphinxes. 
Drive on thou droschky, (of which the Ischvost- 
chik has reverently Lifted his hat, crossing himself 
repeatedly as we passed the joss-house,) for I am 
very hungry and want my breakfast. 



456 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. 



l'envoi. 



It is the lot of every man who aspires to, who 
achieves publicity, or who — as very frequently hap- 
pens — has publicity thrust upon him, to be favoured 
by the attention of that numerous, and apparently 
increasing class, the " people who go about say- 
ing things." I am afraid that I shall never attain 
sufficient celebrity for these small scandalmongers 
to take the trouble of reporting that I have gone 
raving mad, that I have sold myself to a publisher 
for a thousand guineas per annum, that I was tried 
at the Old Bailey in early life for the offence of 
piracy on the high seas, or that I have run away 
from my wife, and am residing at Hombourg with a 
Mingrelian princess. Yet, when I returned to Eng- 
land, in December, 1856, I found that the " people 
who go about saying things" had hung upon the 
the very slight peg of its being known in a few 
London " circles " that I was the author of a " Jour- 
ney Due North," an amusing budget of scandal. 
I have to thank those industrious and well-informed 
gentlemen, the London correspondents of the minor 
provincial journals, for their sedulous circulation of 
a cheerful report that I had been sent to Siberia, 
that I had been expelled from the Russian territory 
by the secret police, and that I was dead. This last 
echantillon of journalistic waggery obtained consid- 
erable currency, and I receive to this day occasional 
communications from anonymous correspondents 
who are anxious to know whether I am yet in the 



l'envoi. 457 

land of the living. A bolder gazetteer hazarded the 
insinuation that I was in the pay of the Russian 
government, and that the somewhat extreme views 
I had adopted with regard to Russian institutions 
were but to be regarded as a proof of deep cunning 
and exceeding Jesuitry. It may afford the last- 
alluded-to journalist some satisfaction when I pub- 
lish the confession that I have twice visited the 
Russian embassy in Chesham Place, once in the 
company of a lady who required Baron Brunnow's 
signature to her passport, and once to pay a visit 
to my esteemed friend, Mr. Pierce, who of course is 
a secret agent of the Autocrat, being the baron's 
accomplished maitre d'hotel. Secret agents, it will 
be observed, always go down the area-steps ; and I 
only regret that I cannot favour my " London Cor- 
respondent" with an accurate report of my inter- 
view with the Secretary of Legation in the pantry. 
Perhaps, however, the most ingenious report to 
which these unpretending sketches gave rise was 
one that I had never been to Russia at ally and that, 
establishing a Patmos at Ostend or Ghent — some 
said Brussels, some went so far as Spa — I had pro- 
vided myself with a good library of books of Rus- 
sian travel, and so " fudged " my " Journey Due 
North" in the, manner attributed (I believe with 
about equal justice) to M. Alexandre Damas anent 
his Impressions de Voyage, 

Curiously, now, sitting at home among English 
scenes and English faces, I am not altogether with- 
out grave doubts of my own as to whether I ever 
visited Russia in the flesh, and whether mine was 

20 



458 A JOURNEY DUB NOETH. 

after all but a spiritual journey Due North, a Pisgah 
view of the Muscovite Palestine. True ; here is 
my passport scrawled and stamped all over by his 
Imperial Majesty's police agents ; here is a penknife 
with the Toula mark on the haft ; here is the rouble- 
note I brought away (against the law) as a souvenir; 
here are my Russian hotel bills, post letters, banker's 
border eauz ; here the Gazette de L' Academic, where 
I, the " well-born Lord von Sala," (save the mark,) 
am described by public advertisement as having the 
intention to quit St. Petersburg in a fortnight from 
the date affixed. Still do I doubt ; still do those 
Russian experiences loom so dimly in the distance ; 
still are they so unreal, so shadowy, that by times I 
am half convinced that my " London Correspond- 
ent" must be right, that I was labouring under 
hallucination the summer before last, and mistook 
the Montague de la Cour for the Nevskoi Perspec- 
tive, the Place d'Armes at Ghent for the Tsarinski 
Loug. It is only when from time to time I visit 
some dear Russian friends^ when by the pleasant 
waters of the Avon we talk about old times, about 
Alexis Hardshellovitch, and the undarkened nights 
we spent so happily in gondolas on the Neva, in 
groups upon the Palace Quay, in the cool saloons of 
the Mala Morskaia ; when returning home the dear 
old samovar is lighted again, and the blue smoke of 
the papiros begins to curl from fair lips ; when the 
tea gleams in the tumbler, and the delicate lemon 
floats on the surface, and when somebody's voice 
murmurs low the plaintive notes of Vos na pouti celo 
halscho'ia — that I am once more in Russia, that the 



l'envoi. 459 

shadow becomes substance, and that we laughingly- 
bid the London Correspondent go hang for a back- 
biter. 

But they are gone too, now, the friends ; and 
things Russian become mistier than ever. Posi- 
tively the only course that remains open to me in 
order to avoid falling into utter skepticism concern- 
ing matters "Due North," is to revisit Russia. I 
wonder whether the little old gentleman at Berlin 
will give me a visa to my passport again, and tell 
me that it is gut nach Russland ? Next time, how- 
ever, if I am once more brought beneath the talons 
of the double eagle, you shall know what the Czar's 
strange land looks like in winter. Adieu. 



THE END. 



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